SBC3 Wifi Testing

This page is currently a work in progress

While our current wifi adapters do work well on the SBC, they are, unfortunately, rather slow. And though the speed, or lack thereof, of our current wifi adapter rarely has a notable impact on our projects, it does occasionally raise some issues. So after it started to negatively affect the performance and functionality of one of our recent projects, we sought to find something a little faster and, if possible, more reliable than what we had available.

But finding a fast and reliable wifi adapter isn't always as simple as going to the store and picking up the first thing you see. Most wifi adapters are created to work well with Windows and have very little concern for the select few users that might purchase their product to use with a Linux based operating system, such as the one that runs on the SBC. And though many of these same wifi adapters do work on Linux , the drivers to run them are rarely a shining example of perfection. The developers don't make enough money to justify perfecting the Linux drivers, they only want to get them working, not working well. The end result almost always has a handful of cut-corners and strange bugs popping up from time to time. So, inevitably, finding a fast and reliable wifi adapter means that you're going to have to do some testing yourself.

-About why Wifi testing is important.

-About why Wifi testing is difficult

Wifi testing can be a very difficult thing to do. Large companies can afford to spend a million dollars, purchase some expensive equipment, hire some professionals, and build a warehouse to do all their testing in. Small companies and home users can't afford to be that lavish.

-About the tools that I used to monitor the wifi devices.

-About the results that I was able to gather immediately after single and multiple tests were completed.

-About the final conclusion for all the wifi adapters that we tested. (Should I include exact prices here? Probably not. Definitely don't include links to the devices that I tested in the end. It's probably okay to include the actual names of the devices that we tested though. That is, is the names actually exist. It seems like many of the devices didn't even have proper names...)

-Talk about the possibility for anyone to do any of their own testing at home and how they could streamline or automate the process to make it perhaps a little less time consuming.