Hi All,

Would be super great to get to the bottom of this since as it stands the USB port is basically un-usable.

Serge

Strangely nobody has pitched in, I am busy trying to find some metal sheet to make a shield myself and test if that changes anything.

Serge

I have just tried to attach USB Vodafone 3G modem and USB flash memory with enabled WiFi.
Works perfect for me at least 30 min.

Hi Gedass,

Thanks but it seems there are enough people on this forum experiencing USB related issues to indicate something is wrong.
30 minutes is not enough testing in any case since I have had mine working fine for 1 hour before it gets "reset"

Thanks,
Serge

I just plugged in a usb memory stick, mounted it and set cron to run 'opkg update' hourly. Let's let it run for a weekend and see how it goes.

Well it is clearly a WiFi related issue. The question imho is: is it caused by EMI or is it caused by power spikes/surges during WiFi operation?
I've had setups where the loss of a USB device (and subsequent crash of the Carambola all together) was directly linked to WiFi activity. I've so far always believed that I'm doing something wrong there. I'm trying to stream a webcam over WiFi. It works in case of my tank drone, but for another small RC car I'm building it didn't work.
So in light of this thread it is reasonable for me to conclude that it's an EMI issue, since the same basic setup works on the tank drone, but not the small car. The major difference being the space available in those cases.
Interestingly soldering the USB cable from the Camera directly to the Carambola module has yielded better results than a custom PCB I made for that project (where USB didn't want to work at all, despite the fact that I adhered to the USB board layout guidelines as much as possible).
I still feel like I'm missing some vital piece of information to properly handle the Carambolas USB port.

Can you decrease WiFi power on small car project and try again ?
BTW in your custom made pcb board USB was connected via 90ohm traces ? How close USB connector was from Carambola module USB pins ?

Actually, how do you decrease the WiFi power output? Never done that before, but would be really interesting to try out.

The USB connecter pads were very close to the pins (about 1cm away), due to the tight space constraint in this project I couldn't route the connector anywhere else safely (not without coming uncomfortably close to power traces, or routing them under the Carambola module, which I figured could be a bad idea due to possible EMI from the module itself).