The wireless variant of the ConnectCore 8X SOM integrates a Qualcomm QCA6574A wireless chipset with the following features:

  • Dual Band 5GHz 802.11ac or 2.4/5GHz 802.11n Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN)

    • 20/40 MHz at 2.4GHz

    • 20/40/80 MHz at 5GHz

  • Open, Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) and Wi-Fi Protected Access 2 (WPA2) (personal and enterprise) authentications as defined in 802.11i

  • Data encryption using Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) or Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP)

  • Country and regulatory domain configuration as defined in 802.11d

  • Dynamic Frequency scaling support on 5GHz networks as defined in 802.11h

  • Station, SoftAP and Wi-Fi Direct (P2P) concurrent modes

  • IBSS/Adhoc mode is not supported, use Wi-Fi Direct instead

  • Bluetooth (BT) 4.2, ANT+, backwards compatible with BT 4.1, 4.0, 3.x, 2.x and 1.0

  • Bluetooth and WLAN coexistence

Digi Embedded Yocto defines the dey-wireless feature that builds the following packages for working with the wireless interface:

  • wpa-supplicant: The WPA supplicant is the IEEE 802.1X/WPA component that is used in the client stations

  • hostapd: An IEEE 802.11 access point and IEEE 802.1X/WPA/WPA2/EAP/RADIUS authenticator

  • crda: The Central Regulatory Domain Agent (CRDA) acts as the udev helper for communication between the kernel and user space for regulatory compliance

  • iw: A nl80211-based CLI configuration utility for wireless devices

  • NetworkManager: Daemon to manage any station network interfaces.

Functionality

See the following topics for more information on working with the wireless interface:

Disabling Wi-Fi

Wi-Fi is enabled by default on the ConnectCore 8X variants that support it. To disable Wi-Fi, add the following lines to your platform device tree:

/* Disable Wi-Fi */
/delete-node/ &{/wireless};
&pcieb {
	/* Drive WL_EN low to disable Wi-Fi */
	pinctrl-assert-gpios = <&gpio3 11 GPIO_ACTIVE_LOW>;
};

This patch:

  • deletes the wireless node of the device tree. The existence of this node triggers the initialization scripts that bring up the Wi-Fi interface, so these won’t start when the node is missing.

    Expect a harmless error message in U-Boot reporting that it couldn’t find the wireless node to fill in its MAC address.

  • makes use of the PCIe node (connected to the Wi-Fi chip), to drive the WL_EN line low, thus disabling the Wi-Fi chip.

    Even if you disable Wi-Fi, you won’t be able to make use of the PCIe interface for connecting to other peripherals because it is connected to the Wi-Fi chip internally. For this you need a variant without Wi-Fi chip. See Hardware variants.