WiFi Hat

How does the performance of Elesar’s WiFi Hat on a R Pi 3 or 4 compare with Wifi on the same computers running Linux (with no hat)? Reading the Wikipedia article on the Raspberry Pi and the technical specification of the WiFi hat on Elesar’s website, it seems that the rate of transfer of data might be about the same, but I am no expert.

Comparing … is slower than WiFi in Linux but all other connections in my network are also slower in RISC OS.
Connect to Internet, NAS, Printer …
For me it is fast enough for the normally things I do.

If I remember correctly (I don’t have access to my RISC OS Pi4 at present) the rate is approximately 20MB/min (335Kb/sec). The wifi HAT works very reliably, e.g. in overnight transfers of GBs of data.
EDIT: I’m talking through my HAT! This is the rate of transfer to/from CloudFS – please ignore!

the rate is approximately 20MB/min (335Kb/sec).

That’s about the rate that I could time on my 4té, either internet or network speed. Although the Hat is reliable indeed, I decided to forget about it because, contrary to Raiks experience, the wired connection is much, much faster. Transfers to and from my NAS for example easily hit 40 MB/sec. But again, the Hat does work and is very reliable, albeit slow.

To put some numbers behind this: the over the air link is 54Mbps, but there’s a bottleneck because the SPI peripheral that RISC OS uses to talk to the HAT’s network controller is only 32Mbps. Allow ~10% for protocol overhead – the network controller does various bits of offload so needs to be instructed – so the peak throughput will be around 28Mbps.

In other words it’ll “feel” a couple of times faster than a 10baseT wired connection would. If there is a wired connection available that will always win because 100baseT and gigabit are faster than the WiFi over the air link rate.

…contrary to Raiks experience,…

No. What I mean was, if I compare the wired connection in Linux with the wired in RISC OS, the RISC OS one is slower. I compare comparable connections on different OS but I not compare a Wifi with a wired connection at the same OS.

How does the performance of Elesar’s WiFi Hat on a R Pi 3 or 4 compare with Wifi on the same computers running Linux (with no hat)?

I rarely boot into Linux on the Pi but, anecdotally, the speed of the WiFi HAT is rarely an issue. For things like web browsing, the WiFi connection isn’t really the main bottleneck on RISC OS. The only time the slower speeds are noticeable is during a large file transfer. It integrates properly with RISC OS and uses the standard RISC OS !Configure Internet tools.

(I like it so much that I recently upgraded to the model with real-time clock.)

Thanks everyone for your responses. You have convinced me enough to give it a shot.

335Kbits/sec? I can’t say I’m very impressed, my Pi 4B running Linux does 45.0Mbits/sec (via ASUS WiFi-AC router to gigabit Ethernet).
But then you don’t even get that over Ethernet from RISC OS, when under Linux it does 939MBits/sec over gigabit Ethernet.

My WiFi HAT sits on top of a Raspberry Pi 4. Initially, with an ethernet cable plugged in, there was no WiFi icon on the iconbar. With the ethernet cable removed, after a power-off and power-on the WiFi icon appeared and some WiFi hotspots appeared in its menu. It worked very easily, but how do you get back to using an ethernet cable except by using the configuration application and doing another power-off and power-on?

After doing this, I had a look at the StartUp file in Boot.Choices.Internet, to find that there was no line ‘RMEnsuring’ EtherWILC 0.01 and ‘RMLoading’ it, whereas there was in the original StartUp file when I was using an ethernet cable! I noticed that the CMOS file had a new date stamp after I did a change, but looking at the new and old CMOS files couldn’t see any difference. What’s going on?

What happens if in the configuration application you tick both the WiFi button and the motherboard button in Interfaces? I get bored experimenting.