Drop-out problem in Asus Tinker Board in WiFi + NAS

Got my Tinker Board a few days ago. Installed Volumio and got it up and running. No sweat! My setup is: NAS+ Tinker Board Built-in WiFi + USB output + USB input from OPPO-BDP105. However, very noticeably, there are drop-out problems. The drop-out duration can be from a fraction of a second to a few seconds. Also, it could be fine and without any drop-outs for a long while.

After some tinkering (no pun intended), I found:

  • USB flash SSD stick : OK
  • Wired ethernet + NAS : OK
  • Built-in WiFi + NAS : intermittent dropouts -> Not OK

I remember, while I played with RPi3b + WiFi + NAS, I had the “click” problem but never the “hole” or “dropout” problem. In Tinker Board WiFi, the music could stop for a fraction of a second up to a few seconds! But I have NOT heard any “clicks” or “pops” in Tinkerboard. This has been very exciting to me. I think if Volumio team fixes the drop-out problem, we could reach some “nirvana” in search of a reasonable music server.

I wonder if there is anything intrinsically different in the Tinker Board version of Volumio in terms of WiFi and buffering comparing to the latest RPi version?

So far, there are a couple of things i found that’s not the same as the latest RPi version:

  • I do noticed in latest version for Tinkerboard I was NOT able to turn on SSH by going to Volumio.local/DEV/.
  • I tried to plug in a TP-Link external USB dongle but it was not recognized. This dongle was recognized in RPi version.

Any ideas?

P.S. BTW, the quality of the audio jack output is quite good! But I also found if I unplug the power while the jack is connected to the preamp, it causes humming noise in the speakers.

Does this look normal? Running ifconfig a couple of minutes after a fresh restart , I noticed there are many RX packets dropped (only 4.9 MB of data received)

wlan0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr f0:03:8c:62:df:71
inet addr:192.168.1.130 Bcast:192.168.1.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:5247 errors:0 dropped:76 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:3166 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:5187397 (4.9 MiB) TX bytes:586036 (572.3 KiB)

The dropped packet over received data MB ratio seems to decrease over the course of time…

wlan0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr f0:03:8c:62:df:71
inet addr:192.168.1.130 Bcast:192.168.1.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:24116 errors:0 dropped:119 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:13529 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:29560900 (28.1 MiB) TX bytes:2095778 (1.9 MiB)

The dropped packages in themselves are not necessarily a cause for concern.

There aren’t any reports here of wifi problems with the Tinker Board, but it’s still very much in it’s infancy. It might well be worth checking on Tinker Board’s forums for other users’ experiences.

I think, but am not certain, that there is little support for USB wifi dongles in the Tinker OS kernel … this kernel will also be used by Volumio, hence your problems with your TP-Link dongle.

Let us know how you get on :slight_smile: