Wireless Raspberry Pi - how things should be

Part I - The Problem

What is it and where it came from? 

In the first place I wanted to have a Raspberry Pi connected to my TV, two rooms away from the wireless router. Nothing too fancy and unusual. But after started Raspbian I found out that the browser(s) couldn't load a single page, hence I couldn't expect any streaming capabilities from a media center. In the default wpa_gui tool (there's a link on the Raspbian's desktop you know) I could see my wireless network listed but the signal was weak and connection was breaking up constantly. I immediately blamed it on the Wi-Pi, but what if I was wrong?

Maybe here is the place where I have to make a small introduction to Wi-Pi. My initial intention was for this whole post to be dedicated to it. I wanted to glorify it and say how fit and useful it is, just because it is another product from the guys that brought us the fabulous Raspberry Pi. The problem with the reception reminded me to be more thoughtful and double check everything. So lets see what the Wi-Pi product is.

The Wi-Pi unit just unpacked

The user manual is very short but graphically informative. Though it is not as interesting as the technical parameters, so here they are:

Wi-Pi's specification printed at the back of its box

With its size and characteristics the Wi-Pi looks pretty amazing and I felt inspired when I first saw it. The excitement was quickly replaced by the undesired feeling of disappointment when the performance issues appeared. At that moment I seemed to had forgotten that my home router is (was) a Linksys WRT54GC, which is a nice ... G class router. I actually never had any issues with it, but at some point I started wondering if it is time for it to step down in favor of a N class router. 

On the other hand, I needed to purchase a second Raspberry Pi unit. I was preparing it for a project where the wireless access is a feature by design, so I needed to get a wireless adapter for it. Since the Wi-Pi was quite questionable, I decided to go in the opposite direction - to get adapter with real and big antenna - just to be sure.

TP-Link TL-WR740N and TP-Link TL-WN722N were my choices in the two situations accordingly. I won't make any analysis or introductions of them here. It's out of scope. And in my opinion the numbers will be more informative.

Sizes of the wireless adapters in comparison

Having the hardware I was getting anxious to speed-test it, as the preparation took me some time. For a headless system I needed some kind of command line speed-testing tool. After some research I realized that there are many different approaches. Most of them used various methodologies of applying the popular wget command (with or without additional tools). Detailed instructions or suggestions are easy to find. Second by popularity seemed to be the speedtest-cli tool. A good tutorial for it can be seen here. But wait a minute! ...

Suddenly I realized that I was going in a very wrong direction - why do I need to test my internet connection when I'm trying to measure the throughput and signal strength of an internal network?

What I actually needed was a tool showing me the network status at a certain point near the router. The new search again showed some specialized commands (like iwconfig and iwlist) in the forums, tutorials and in Linux Journal, but the most useful tool for me appeared to be wavemon. This is a console based graphical application, which shows in detail various parameters of the Wi-Fi network your device is connected to. It is well explained here and originates from here.

At this point all I had to do, was to go wild with the Raspy around the house and make the measurements. How did all go is explained in Part II.