[Bloat] USB3 or HDMI ethernet? - Are wires dead?

[Dave Taht]

On Mon, Apr 18, 2016 at 7:50 AM, Dave Taht <dave.taht at gmail.com> wrote:
> I wanted to be able to do wifi aircaps at scale,  So I figured I'd
> load up a nuc with a bunch of usb wifi sticks. I got a w(hole bunch of
> those - the horrors! the horrors that the drivers revealed...
>
> then I ran across the compute stick phenomenon,
>
> Holy cow, 59 dollars for an entire computer - with wifi on board.
>

> http://www.amazon.com/Intel-Compute-STCK1A8LFC-Z3735F-Ubuntu/dp/B00W7KAABK/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1460990238&sr=8-1&keywords=ubuntu+compute+stick

So I got one of these older models to play with. It came in a nice
box. It was marvelous to plug the male hdmi port directly into my
stereo A/V amp and have it automatically install and configure ubuntu
14.04LTS (kernel 3.16). It took a while to install itself, but after
about 15 minutes of updating I had got it up and running. It's pretty
neat as a desktop, not particularly fast, but once an app is loaded
it's "good enough" for day to day work.

I added a 19 dollar 32Gbyte SDHC card to use as my "home" directory,
as there is only about 5GB usable on the stick itself (71% of the
internal emmc used by default), bringing my total cost to under a
hundred bucks.

I played with it a bit...

Sound doesn't work, which eliminates my musical use case (at least for
now). I thought maybe this would be a good option for a midi
controller, also, might try that.

The wifi does ~10Mbits in my admittedly crowded spectrum. The linux
log fills with all sorts of RTL871X debug messages, and the thing is
about as bloated as the ath9k can be - 344-500ms delay on the up in
netperf.

The wifi is a realtek chip, ironically, I guess, intel couldn't fit
one of their wifi cards into it: rtl8723bs

And my original use case of having a compute stick I could use to
sample the air with? So far with various tools I haven't been able to
get a monitor interface to work. :(

Overall it's kind of nice to have an intel architecture box that costs
about the same as a tricked out raspberry pi. I'd like it if I could
power it via a conventional usb port and network it that way, but
haven't tried that yet.

I am tempted to pick up one of the windows versions to play with.

> --
> Dave Täht
> Save BoatyMcBoatFace from extinction by humorless science ministers!
> https://twitter.com/hashtag/boatymcboatface



-- 
Dave Täht
Let's go make home routers and wifi faster! With better software!
http://blog.cerowrt.org