Support for Quectel EP06 LTE-A?

General discussion
1

Does anyone know when support for this mini-pci card will be added?

If it won’t be added by the Omnia team, is there a way I can add it myself?

Also, in RC 3.11 is the WiFi module WLE900VX now fully functional? Prior to RC 3.11, if this card was installed, my current Quectel LTE card would not work correctly.

Thank you, please advise.

2

Hello @robroy90,

I see this is just one line patch, so it shouldn’t break anything. I will see if I can add it by myself, if not I will ask my colleagues to do it for you.

If there’d be anything new, I’ll tell you, because we’d like to have feedback, if it works or not.

About the issue, which you mention about the LTE card. Would you please tell us more details about it?

3

Pepe,

Thank you for responding to me. I would really appreciate it if the team could add support for the Quectel EP06 LTE-Advanced mini-pci card, I would really appreciate it. The older Quectel EC20 card works just fine for me with Verizon here in the United States, but the EP06 card supports LTE-Advanced speeds that I would like to obtain. I bought the EP06 card and installed it to see if it would be recognized, but it wasn’t. I even tried to add it manually, but that did not work That leads me to believe the kernel needs to be modified to add support for it.

Please let me know how I can work with you directly moving forward, as I will be glad to support this endeavor in any way I can.

Thank you very much,

-Rob

4

Same problem here, I would like to work with EP06 :slight_smile:

5

Hello,

I was looking into it, it took me a little time as I don’t compile locally yet, but I did it!

In a few minutes, I will push it into the nightly branch. So around the afternoon you can try it, if you want, but nightly build are for experienced users as sometimes there could be something broken.

It will be part of Turris OS 3.11. However, I’d appreciate any feedback regarding this modem as I have some hint that for working QMI it will requires additional patch.

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6

Pepe,

THANK YOU VERY MUCH!

I am on the rc branch, and my Omnia has 3.11 already, will it just pull down the update on its own?

Thanks again!

-Rob

7

Yes, once we’d release a new RC version, it’ll be there included.

8

Pepe: Hope you are well!

How can I determine if my device has the code changes you made for the LTE-A cellular modems?

I am on the RC branch, do I need to switch to another, or has there been a push to RC past 3.11 so that I can now install my new board?

Thanks, please advise.

-Rob

9

It was included in some RC version of Turris OS 3.11, so it’s included in Turris OS 3.11, which we released for everyone yesterday. Can you try it and see, if it works?

10

I am set to the RC branch now, so what is the best method to actually get this update? Use:

/usr/bin/updater.sh

Or should I use other commands?

11

It would be good to switch to the stable release, which can be done by this command

switch-branch deploy

and don’t use the updater.sh as it is deprecated and instead of it use pkgupdate.

12

I updated to stable branch and I am on 3.11 - Please see attached. With the current mini-pci card (screenshot named current) I can see/select USB2 and configure the card to make a successful connection to the internet. When I power down and swap the cards, installing the EP06-A (screenshot named EP06-A) I do not have the same choices for the interface and I do not remember the commands in SSH to enumerate the devices the system sees, What do I need to do from here? Thanks, please advise.

Current
Current1196×1488 214 KB
EP06-A
EP06-A1196×1488 206 KB

13

Pepe: What about my latest attempts? Do you have any ideas or solutions?

14

Have you taped PCI-e pins as it was described here - Quectel EP06 configuration?

Is there anything in lspci or lsusb? Screenshots from LuCI for this issue are not helpful. Only what I can see, there is that you don’t have there /dev/ttyUSB0-3, but it doesn’t say why.

15

Hi,
I recently got my parents a Quectel EP06-A for Christmas. If you need and there is some instructions on how to compile and load a Turris kernel, I can look into putting my hard hat on!

I do not think it is a good idea to tape the pins. Specifically, the pins the user taped on another forum are the USB 3.0 tx/rx pins, so taping them will likely result in USB 2.x speeds.

Moreover, I think the one-line kernel modification suggested is wrong and should be reverted. In addition, some code to dynamically configure the Quectel interface should be added per this commit below:

Can the Turris team please apply the above patch?

16

I believe these two patches will also be necessary:


17

Support for Quectel EP06 wasn’t backported to LTS kernel 4.4 as you can see here.
However, the one line patch was backported to LTS kernel 4.9, and also for LTS kernel 4.14.

Right now for Turris 1.x and Turris Omnia, we’re using LTS kernel 4.4, which is supported until February 2022.
With Turris OS 4.0, we’re using LTS kernel 4.14, which is supported until January 2020. In a few months ago, we have released Turris OS 4.0 for Turris Omnia and Turris 1.x in early alpha state.

And looking about commit: USB: serial: option: improve Quectel EP06 detection, it was backported just to LTS kernel 4.14. So, with Turris OS 4.0 it should be better.

I’d like to know, if it works now before making any changes and all these commits are made from the same author.

I do not think it is a good idea to tape the pins. Specifically, the pins the user taped on another forum are the USB 3.0 tx/rx pins, so taping them will likely result in USB 2.x speeds.

This one is a little bit complicated. You can look for example here:

Some LTE modems are not detected by hardware, if pins are not tapped as it avoids pin incompatibility between PCIe data interface lines and the USB3 lines. For some users it can be enough to use USB 2.0 speeds, however, if you’d like to use USB 3 speed, you would need to have an adapter and plug it to the front or back USB 3.0 port.

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18

Pepe,

Thanks for your quick and informative response! Glad to see all the commits will land in Turris OS 4.0!

I see your comments about the taping. I think I will wait for Turris OS 4.0 before resorting to the taping and further testing, even though waiting may be in vain. I am not skilled at doing this and weary about the tape getting stuck in the mPCI-e slot and damaging my Omnia device.

I can try Turris OS 4.0 alpha sometime soon to see if it works without modification if you could kindly provide some instructions or location of current Turris OS 3.x image (so I can rollback from 4.0 alpha after testing…).

19

Thank you to all who are interested and willing to further this effort. I would very much like to leverage the EP06. I want to be able to use mine as well, and I will assist this effort in any way I can.

20

Turris repo files https://repo.turris.cz/

TOS branches workflow https://gitlab.labs.nic.cz/turris/turris-build/blob/master/WORKFLOW.asciidoc

My workflow for switching between current 3.x and testing 4.x

  1. from current 3.x stable last good known schnapps create
  2. then export that snapshot with schnapps export (takes a few moments to complete, preferably choose a saving path to external drive)
  3. download the generate files (*.tar.gz | *info) from router via ssh to local client
  4. download medkit for TOS4.branch for the Turris repo
  5. reset the router with the medkit from the TOS4.branch
  6. after testing the TOS4.branch completed and a rollback to the 3.x is desired there are 2 ways to go about:
  • upload exported snapshot files for 3.x (*.tar.gz | *.info) via ssh from local client to the router and import via schnapps import and then rollback to the imported snapshot, or (my preference)
  • router medkit reset with the snapshot medkit file created from the 3.x last last good known

This way safely switching between 3.x and 4.x takes usually less than 10 minutes and it saves a setup from scratch for the 3.x

NOTE: schnapps export requires the tar package being installed, which is not by default Cannot export shnapps snapshot - #4 by anon50890781 - SW bugs discussion - Turris forum

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