Hi,
I'm working on an in house development which uses a Zynq SoC running a Linux kernel. I've had some great help on the Wi-Fi forums with getting the Wl18xx up and working, and now I'm looking for some advice with the TRF7970A.
The TRF970A was a far easier to get up and running compared to the Wl18xx, and we've had it working on our platform, using Neard (as advised in TI documentation). We've interfaced into the device using NeardAL (again as advised within TI documentation) and have found results to be very patchy. It sometimes reads tags, sometimes doesn't, sometimes reads records on a tag, sometimes doesn't. Generally it's very unreliable. To try and prove it's not the antenna we've designed on a flexi PCB, we've wired the antenna of the TRF7970A EVM onto our board and found results to be the same, which effectively rules out our antenna. In an attempt to strip the problem back, we've removed NeardAl out of the equation and used the test scripts that came with Neard to read/dump tags. This is a little better but is still too unreliable for a product. My confidence in Neard is further hit with the fact that when I build Neard, the ncl utility that comes with it seg faults as soon as you run it!!
So, there's a few questions we'd like to ask:
- Has anyone else witnessed the unreliable nature of Neard and NeardAl?
- Has anyone ditched Neard to use anything else? If so, what?
- Has anyone any general suggestions we could try to improve things?
Thanks in advance,
Sion