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Is the Raspberry Pi Forum Broken ?

o.thornwall

Hello All !

I recently purchased a Raspberry Pi 4, only to find out the wifi does not work.

I purchase it from CanaKit.

Sadly to say CanaKit are no help other then they told me to "Go to the RP forum and ask them" (or something almost exactly like that)

So I tried to log into the RP Forum only to find after about 15 tries, I got no where. Can't get in or cant even get a email response for the forum administration.

Anybody know what is going on with the RP forum ?

And does anyone have any good suggestions on how to (or where to) get my RP4 fixed ?

Thank you all ! Standing by !

  • 0 in reply to o.thornwall

    I'm sorry to hear your having problems with the PI. FWIW I don't find the wifi on my PI4 works nearly as well as my phone/laptop/wifi dongle.

    I do think it is strange they put a metal case around the wifi antenna...

  • 0 in reply to shabaz

    I've often looked at the aluminum cases but passed because all I saw was a cool looking Faraday cage.  I guess it's not just my imagination.
    I was thinking that the metal case might be good for an EMF noisy industrial environment, but then  shared Episode 566: How to Automate Welding Positioners with Arduino and that kind of shot that idea down also.

  • 0 in reply to kmikemoo

    The aluminium cases do visually look great though : )  These Seeed re_computer cases are nice looking, they are anodized alu surround, and I resorted to using the Ethernet connection for the Pi in those. There are round holes ready-plugged up, that are the right size for SMA connectors, so I used that, for the plug-on board on the Pi, which was for the LoRaWAN wireless portion, not WiFi unfortunately.

    Another neat thing about these cases is that the top is transparent plastic (so I fitted LEDs inside, to shine on the board). The plan was to make the LEDs blink off and back on whenever there was LoRaWAN activity, but that's something the HAT board doesn't support, so I need to still figure that out.. it should be possible by snooping on a Linux log file perhaps, but I've not started looking into that yet.

    Also I soldered up a DC barrel socket to microUSB cable, so that the Pi is more easily powered from a 5V supply. This works great for Pi 3B+. I first tried Pi 4, but the HAT board didn't function with it (despite the manufacturer thinking it did). The Pi 3B+ is better in many ways (more compatible with older hardware drivers, and less difficult to power it up due to lower current requirement, and probably runs cooler, and I didn't need any high-performance for this use-case).

    image

  • 0 in reply to scottiebabe

    I remember this design of case first being introduced, it was purposefully for 'xbmc' aka 'kodi' on the Raspberry Pi and for a 'media pc' style setup, where it was entirely passively cooled and you'd rely mainly on ethernet rather than on wireless lan / wifi - thanks to the amount of metal in it. Really good for passive cooling, really poor for WiFi connectivity.

    It kinda makes sense that a Raspberry Pi would be able to 'see' wifi access points in this, but not connect to them. The initial handshake broadcast of WiFi is the 'most compatible' beacons, and don't take a lot to be picked up, but the handshake that happens after the details have been shared in that beacon often fall over or fail because of the suitable environment needed to establish that connection successfully.