HiKey USB Limitations

Does the ‘new’ LeMaker version of the Hikey have the same USB ‘design limitations’ as the original CircuitCo version?
I am unable to connect a keyboard/mouse, as this cripples the (USB/Ethernet) network throughput… 2.4GHz WiFi throughput is even worse…
This would not be such an issue, if I could actually get the semi-proprietary TI Bluetooth/WiFi setup to work…

Robert Gadsdon.
November 30, 2015.

Unfortunately it still is: it is a limitation of the SoC.
One solution for your setup is to use a usb OTG hub.

Thanks for the info - I was afraid that this was the case…

I did try a hub attached to the OTG micro-USB port, but it only recognised both the Ethernet and Bluetooth adapters at the “full” (slow) speed setting…

At the “high” setting, I get:
usb 1-1.4: new full-speed USB device number 76 using dwc2
usb 1-1.4: device not accepting address 76, error -71
usb 1-1-port4: unable to enumerate USB device

  • and lsusb only shows the Ethernet adapter, and hub/s…

RG.

I can see what you are seeing on my side. Let me find more info about this OTG workaround.

This commit kind of sumarizes the situation with the host ports:
https://github.com/96boards/linux/commit/ab1c6fb74a9cd111df246aeaeefd03731c0f9b44

I did some code to make sure the host speed bus settings were always defaulting to the common denominator but we never merged it because I was told it had some impact on the OTG behavior:

In any case it wouldnt help with your use case.

We have tried BT input devices and found them to be functional. Which one are you using?

The LeMaker version usb have the same design in the usb limitation.
And I guess if in future, we special a usb port just for low speed, while the other one is for high speed, so that we can use mouse&keyboard and other usb device at the same time.

That is right, there is no way around that. The bus speed needs to be set to the lowest common denominator.

This would not be such an issue, if I could actually get the onboard Bluetooth/WiFi combo to work… I had tried (cross)compiling the hybrid 96Boards/TI stack several times, according to the detailed instructions, but the BT firmware never loaded… Maybe this will be easier when the ‘old’ 3.18 base is updated? I have tried the hikey-mainline-rebase 4.x versions over several months, but the SDcard is never recognized… (booting with UEFI/Grub…)

For the time being, I will stay with headless operation, and a relatively stable August 3 version of 3.18…

Thanks…

RG.

I am using 15.11 with the usb auto-negotiation patches I mentioned before to make sure the usb bus always runs at the highest possible speed - lowest common denominator.

Are you saying that on 15.11 BT/WIFI is not functional? It seems fine on my end.

Could you share any error logs (dmesg) please?