usbnet
Has anybody with done anything with usbnet? It is supported on various debian releases. With it you could have a number of BB (and BB+Kiwi) and daisy chain them with usbnet and have only one Cat5 ethernet connection.
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Has anybody with done anything with usbnet? It is supported on various debian releases. With it you could have a number of BB (and BB+Kiwi) and daisy chain them with usbnet and have only one Cat5 ethernet connection.
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On my BB-AI usebnet is already there. I need to understand more about connmand. I am hope that I can reduce betwork noise from my 4 kiwi systems this way. May be better than using wifi.
Rob,AI6VN, and I have looked at using Kiwi/BB in a "power-over-USB" manner in order to hopefully reduce ground loops and noise with a single OpenWRT WiFi router. While Rob has been using it with the KiWi/BB as client, using the microUSB connector on the BB and the only USB-A that existed on the router, through use of a Y cable to supply power from the USB-A port on the BB, I've been interested in using only host-host mode. That is, only a single interconnection from the Kiwi/BB to the router via a USB-A to USB-A cable.
I don't know anything about the USBnet world but from a brief search it looks like its host-host mode might be what's needed. I made the power distribution work with a simple router modification so that it received kiwi-sourced power as well as data and allowed the KiwiSDR-to-BB_PMIC power distribution to work normally but I was not able to get both (host) sides to talk beyond satisfying ARP from the BB side. The router wanted to see a client connection and didn't so apparently couldn't/wouldn't talk the other way (except for ARP).
I haven't looked at this for a while but am still interested in the possibility.
@N6GN How are you guys overcoming the 500 mA current limit on the 5V input of the micro-USB of the BBG? (The PMIC chip enforces this. The limit can be raised by programming an internal register using the I2C interface, but that becomes a chicken/egg problem since the Kiwi board power-up can't be delayed from the BBG).
I haven't tried it, but one thing I think you can do is solder in the (normally depopulated) R168 zero ohm jumper that ties USB_DC and VDD_5V together. See page 2 of the BBG schematic. VDD_5V is the 5V input coming from the Kiwi board via the BBG headers and goes to the "AC" input pin on the PMIC. The AC input has a default current limit of 2.5A and the PMIC knows to preferentially select it when both USB_DC and AC input voltages are present (hence they can be shorted together by R168 and the higher current limit of the AC input applies).
I'm not doing any PoE or main USB feeds. Initially I just want to look into daisy chaining my 4 BBAI systems and feeding the first one with normal Cat5.
In may be for naught as earler, when I had all four on Wifi network connectivity, I couldn't find any "noise advantage"
@jks I think we're dealing with it by using the 2x.5A available from the (dual output) TPS2051 sourcing the USB-A connector. Rob has built a Y cable so he could get data from the microUSB-client connector but power from the USB-A. It may be that the router is pulling even less than .5A too, I don't think I've measured it.
I have only used the USB-A for power after searching for the location of the absent R168 and not finding it! I don't have a copy of Orcad to locate it and gave up. If someone here does and can post this using SEEDs file I'd appreciate it.
But I think a nicer solution would be the USB-A-to-USB-A connection though since that should be capable of working, given the correct driver incantations and wouldn't require any Kiwi/BB modifications. Maybe USBnet can do this. However the router we're using needs a (simple) modification to get it to accept 5V from the USB-A which it normally tries to serve rather than receive power from.