RPi 400 and RO5.30/5.31

Title should have mentioned WiFi as well…

Have had some success (finally) getting a fairly stable set up of RO 5.31 on a RPi4 using the ROD networking stack (7.07) and thereby being able to use RO over WiFi including headless with VNC connections.

But have not had such success with the RPi 400.
I have 2 variants, 1 a US keyboard layout and 1 a UK keyboard layout.

Loading up the working image from the RPi4 mentioned above was not successful with regards to WiFi.
The ROOL WiFi solution baked into 5.30/5.31 did not work. The ROD WiFi stack worked for short periods of time.

So I baked a clean disc image just for the RPi 400s (in case it was some module, update or program that I had also loaded that was causing issues).
The ROOL wifi implementation did not work. It would initially pick up and list 1 of the locally available wifi access points (not sure if it was the 2.4 or the 5.0Ghz one, but did not pick up both). I could not successfully connect to it. The Wifi name would change to code format ie AB:00:… etc and would not actually connect at all.

The ROD wifi stack 7-07 with network manager sees the wifi access points and will allow connection. It all works as expected but after approx 15-30 (max) minutes (varies) it will have a fault whereby the hour glass timer comes up and is an animated green colour. Obviously it stops working. The machine temporarily hangs in this state until an ALT-BREAK is pressed and network manager can be stopped. Then the machine will work again. A restart required to get WiFi working once more.
Obviously not really usable if it keeps timing out like this.

Tried the above tests on both the RPi400US and the RPi400UK machines with identical issues.

I believe the network chip in the RPi400 is different to the RPi4b and that there are even 2 variants of the chip used in the Rpi400 (reportedly due to covid period chip shortages).
I don’t know how to tell which RPi400 chips I am using but might be able to use SCRNinfo program. Don’t really want to pull them apart to read the numbers off the chips but can if needed.

Has anyone success with the RPi400s with WiFi and if yes do you know with which variant, ie older or more recent models.
Do you know how to check which one you have from serial numbers or similar ?

Would like to get these running too but am unable at present.

Hello,

I think things are a bit hit and miss at the moment with the two competing network stacks, but in case it’s useful just to know it’s possible…

…I have Wifi working on a RP400 running RISCOS 5.30 (15 May 2024) with the ROD networking stack. The NIC shows up as “BCM43” in the networking section under !Boot but I leave it disabled there. If I run !NetManager I can get it to connect to my home network which is authenticated with WPA2 Personal.

I did get the ROOL stack to work too, but only by creating a new unencrypted network with authentication just by MAC address.

Wifi on RISCOS is a great achievement, but I must admit that so far I still use a wired connection (with the ROD stack) for performance reasons and stability.

Daniel

“Wifi on RISCOS is a great achievement, but I must admit that so far I still use a wired connection (with the ROD stack) for performance reasons and stability.”

On the RPi 400 indeed ! On the Rpi4 i have got pretty good stability and speed with the ROD stack for WiFi.