The wireless variant of the ConnectCore 8M Nano SOM integrates the Qualcomm QCA6564 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

  • Fast BSS Transition as defined in 802.11r (Fast Roaming)

  • Dynamic Frequency Selection (DFS) 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) 5.0, ANT+, backwards compatible with BT 4.2, 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 Wi-Fi 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 Wi-Fi 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 8M Nano variants that support it, by means of a device tree overlay. The Digi Embedded Yocto boot script automatically detects if the variant has a Wi-Fi chip and adds the Wi-Fi overlay to the U-Boot environment overlays variable.

To disable Wi-Fi, set the following environment variable in U-Boot:

=> setenv disable_wifi 1
=> saveenv

This prevents the boot script from adding the Wi-Fi overlay, which results in the system disabling the Wi-Fi interface.

To revert this change, remove the variable and the boot script will load the wireless overlay again.

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

Even if you disable Wi-Fi, you won’t be able to make use of the uSDHC1 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.