New Wifi Hardware?

[ecasey]

Is this only available in Vegas?

When can we see this if we can't get to Vegas?

[dciliske]

It will be available after Vegas. We are currently getting the dev carrier boards made and final drivers written. This has been a long time coming.

Also, on a personal note: Wow, now I understand why you guys like using our stuff...

[ecasey]

Excellent! Looking forward to it.

Thanks

Ed

[curibe]

Want to check out the new NetBurner wireless solution? A new picture was just tweeted today on NetBurners twitter page. It shows the SOM version mounted on the adapter board that will ship with the new wireless development kits. Add the NetBurner twitter feed to you account to get the latest NetBurner news and updates. http://www.twitter.com/netburner

[sblair]

Hey guys,

We've got our current MOD54415 carrier board designed to accept the old Wifi module. Will the new one still be compatible in place of the old one? Or do we need to re-design to allow for the new model? We're doing another run of our carrier boards soon so if I need to do design changes now would be the time. Hoping we won't though.

Thanks.
Scott

[dciliske]

There is an adapter/module designed that will be a drop-in replacement for the old wifi module.

Just to give a bit of update/further spec on things. When the wifi dev kit goes on sale, the firmware for the modules will still be in beta. The performance will be relatively low compared to what it can be; the chief concern at the moment is stability. Currently, (as of 5 minutes ago) the SPI bus can only run up to ~4MHz stably. I've been able to run it at 8MHz for a time, but then a timing issue crops up, corrupting the bus. Throughput from a MOD5441X at 4MHz is 220-300KB/s, depending on wireless link stability. At 8MHz, I see ~500-550KB/s, until the bus becomes corrupts. I would expect that the performance on a MOD5270/5272/5282 to be a bit lower, especially as the bus speed increases, due to the greater number of interrupts required for the QSPI bus compared to the DMA usage on the DSPI bus. As the stability increases, I expect the speed will follow suit.

-Dan

[kackle123]

Will we be able to use the new WiFi module with the (cheaper) SB70LC platform that I've learned to use over the last few years? The NBWIFIIN-SOM datasheet currently has 2 or 3 different WiFi part numbers in it and only one picture of a WiFi part (and only one pinout table). It only requires a serial port on the host processor, no?

[mbrown]

Dan and a few of our other designers are out of the office for the training today and tomorrow and I don't know if they're reading the forums as religiously as usual, so I'll reply in his stead. Our intention is to offer the wi-fi modules with drivers for UART and SPI communication to the SOM. As long as you have a singular UART or SPI port available on one of our boards, you should be able to use the wi-fi module.

[pbreed]

As of Today only the 54415 driver is working.
We will have the uart/Serial driver running on all platforms next,
Then we will add spi support to most platforms.
This will happen over the next month or two...

(Maybe not the SB72 or CFV-2-66)

[kackle123]

Thank you for your response.

FYI, I know its datasheet is new, and changing weekly, but the datasheet is really confusing right now; e.g., the part number at the top is "NBWIFIIN-SOM", but now, I don't think the photo below it matches that number. I didn't even know there was a chip-only version until staring at the datasheet for a while.(?)

Confusion breeds dumb posts like mine that only waste your time. :-)