Wi-Fi 8 (802.11bn) to focus on reliability and efficiency while maintaining Wi-Fi 7 performance

WiFi 4 vs WiFi 5 vs WiFi 6 vs WiFi 7 vs WiFi 8

Wi-Fi 7 (802.11be) routers and modules have only been launched recently, but engineers are already working on Wi-Fi 8 (802.11bn) “Ultra High Reliability (UHR)”, and MediaTek shared some details in a whitepaper detailing some of the improvements of the new standard for its upcoming Filogic Wi-Fi 8 SoCs. Surprisingly, there aren’t any enhancements to the maximum performance with Wi-Fi 8 still offering up to 320 MHz channel bandwidth, 23 Gbps maximum PHY rate, and support for 2.4 GHz, 5GHz, and 6GHz frequency bands, as well as up to 8 spatial streams. The Wi-Fi 8 improvements are all meant to improve Wi-Fi reliability, network efficiency, and power consumption in IoT use cases, which will end up improving the overall WLAN performance when many nodes are connected. Wi-Fi 8 new features: Coordinated Target Wait Time (TWT) allows low-power IoT devices to negotiate specific times for transmission with access points in order to […]

OpenWrt One WiFi 6 router with Filogic 820 SoC launched for $89

OpenWrt One Router

The “OpenWrt One/AP-24.XY” is a Filogic 820-based WiFi 6 router board manufactured by Banana Pi whose software is directly managed by OpenWrt developers with assistance from MediaTek. The router was first announced in January 2024, and developer samples became available sometime in April with some early units auctioned away at the OpenWrt Summit which took place in Cyprus on May 18-19. The good news is that the OpenWrt One is now available to anyone on Aliexpress for $89 including a metal enclosure, a PoE module, three antennas, and a power supply. Here’s a reminder of the OpenWrt One router specifications: SoC – MediaTek MT7981B (Filogic 820) dual-core Cortex-A53 processor @ 1.3 GHz System Memory – 1GB DDR4 Storage 128 MB SPI NAND flash for U-boot and Linux 4 MB SPI NOR flash for write-protected (by default) recovery bootloader (reflashing can be enabled with a jumper) Two types of flash devices […]

Linux 6.11 Release – Notable changes, Arm, RISC-V and MIPS architectures

Linux 6.11 release

Linux 6.11 is out with Linus Torvalds’ announcement on the Linux kernel mailing list (LKML): I’m once again on the road and not in my normal timezone, but it’s Sunday afternoon here in Vienna, and 6.11 is out. The last week was actually pretty quiet and calm, which is nice to see. The shortlog is below for anybody who wants to look at the details, but it really isn’t very many patches, and the patches are all pretty small. Nothing in particular stands out – the biggest patch in here is for Hyper-V Confidential Computing documentation. Anyway, with this, the merge window will obviously open tomorrow, and I already have 40+ pull requests pending. That said, exactly _because_ I’m on the road, it will probably be a fairly slow start to the merge window, since not only am I on my laptop, there’s OSS Europe starting tomorrow and then the […]

Review of Napcat wireless NVR with solar-powered security cameras

Napcat solar-powered wireless NVR review

After I reviewed the NapCat smart video doorbell last June, the company asked me to review a wireless NVR with solar-powered security cameras and I understood I would receive a kit with four solar-powered cameras and an NVR with storage preinstalled. In this review, I’ll go through an unboxing, a quick teardown of the NVR, the installation process, and my experience with the Napcat NVR user interfaces (connected to HDMI) and the Napcat Life Android app which I also used with the video doorbell. Napcat wireless NVR N1S22 kit unboxing The package I’ve received reads “N1S22” model of a “Solar-powered Security Camera System” and is quite smaller than I expected. One reason for the small size is that my kit only comes with two cameras instead of four, and the company also did a good job of making everything take as little space as possible. On the net, you’ll see […]

Review of AgroSense LoRaWAN Smart Agriculture sensors with the SenseCAP M2 LoRaWAN gateway

AgroSense LoRaWAN Sensor Review

Today, I will be reviewing the AgroSense LoRaWAN sensors from Makerfabs designed for high-precision agriculture. This time, I received four sets of sensors designed for measuring environmental data and a Seeed Studio SenseCAP M2 LoRaWAN gateway. Below is the list of items I received. AgroSense LoRaWAN Barometric Pressure Sensor – Measures the barometric pressure in a 300 to 1100 hPa range with ±0.12 hPa accuracy and 0.01 hPa resolution. AgroSense LoRaWAN Light Intensity Sensor – Measures the light intensity in a 1 to 65535 lx range with ±1 lx accuracy and ±20% resolution. AgroSense LoRaWAN Temperature & Humidity Sensor – Measures temperature and humidity in the atmosphere in the ranges of -40°C to 85°C and 0 to 100 %RH with accuracy of ±0.2°C and ±0.2% RH respectively. AgroSense LoRaWAN Industrial Temperature Sensor – Measures temperature in the industrial high-temperature environments in the -60°C to 200°C range with ±0.1°C accuracy and […]

How to easily enable MediaTek MT7922 Bluetooth on Ubuntu 24.04

MT7922 Bluetooth Ubuntu 24.04

MediaTek MT7922 WiFi 6 and Bluetooth 5.3 modules have recently been found in several mini PCs, but Bluetooth would not work in Linux due to a lack of drivers. In this post, we’ll show how to easily enable Bluetooth in MediaTek MT7922 modules when running Ubuntu 24.04. We previously noted that Ian Morrisson submitted a patch adding the IDs for the MT7922 module (Azurewave AW-XB591NF) used in recent GEEKOM mini PCs last March. In theory, you could have rebuilt the Linux kernel, but now that Linux 6.10 has been released, it’s much easier since Canonical has made the Linux 6.10 kernel available for Ubuntu, so we only need to install it and problem solved! Ubuntu 24.04 ships with Linux 6.8, we can see a Bluetooth opcode error in the kernel log.

Linux 6.10 Release – Notable changes, Arm, RISC-V, and MIPS architectures

Linux 6.10 Release Changelog

Linux Torvalds has announced the release of Linux 6.10 on LKML: So the final week was perhaps not quote as quiet as the preceding ones, which I don’t love – but it also wasn’t noisy enough to warrant an extra rc. And much of the noise this last week was bcachefs again (with netfs a close second), so it was all pretty compartmentalized. In fact, about a third of the patch for the last week was filesystem-related (there were also some btrfs latency fixes and other noise), which is unusual, but none of it looks particularly scary. Another third was drivers, and the rest is “random”. Anyway, this obviously means that the merge window for 6.11 opens up tomorrow. Let’s see how that goes, with much of Europe probably making ready for summer vacation. And the shortlog below is – as always – just the last week, not some kind […]

Banana Pi BPI-R4-NIC-BE14 WiFi 7 module for BPI-R4 SBC launched for $74

Banana Pi BPI-R4-NIC-BE14 WiFi 7 Module

The Banana Pi BPI-R4 was introduced last year as a WiFi 7 router board with two 10GbE SFP cages and four GbE ports based on MediaTek Filogic 880 SoC. The only issue is that WiFi 7 is implemented through a dual mini PCIe module that was not available until now. The good news is that the tri-band Banana Pi BPI-R4-NIC-BE14 WiFi 7 module for the Banana Pi BPI-R4 board can now be purchased for $73.69 on Aliexpress. It is based on MediaTek MT7995AV WiFi 7 chipset, MT7976CN dual-band (2.4GHz and 5 GHz) chipset, and MT7977IAN 6GHz chipset. Banana Pi BPI-R4-NIC-BE14 specifications: MediaTek MT7995AV WiFi 7 – IEEE 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac/ax/be compliant 32-bit RISC-V MCU for Wi-Fi protocols and Wi-Fi offload Embedded SRAM and ROM UART interface with hardware flow control MediaTek MT7976CN dual-band 2.4GHz 2×2 MIMO and 5GHz 3×3 MIMO MediaTek MT7977IAN 6GHz 3×3 MIMO Bandwidth 2.4 GHz – 20 and […]

UP 7000 x86 SBC