Hi good day. I'm an ICT educator and I tested the Moodlebox with 3 of my classes in order to test the connection capacity. I'm using a Raspberry Pi 4, 4gb RAM, 32 gb SD card, 5.1V/3.5A output power supply, latest version of MoodleBox. I tested with students connecting to the wireless network using first Mobile phones and then with Laptops.
On all occasions I was able to have only about 10 clients connected maximum to the MoodleBox wireless network. I know in the documentation they indicated that at least 25 clients should be able to connect simultaneously.
Is there anything that I can do or buy, to allow more concurrent wireless client connections to the MoodleBox installation?
Any help in this matter, will be greatly appreciated.
Thanks
Keith
Very low amount of WiFi clients can connect
- Edited
keithlab I know I had about 13 devices connected to a MoodleBox in March: https://discuss.moodlebox.net/d/36-low-number-of-concurrent-connected-users/19. That was a RPi 3B, the MoodleBox version must have been 2.6.x. It would be odd if RPi 4B and MoodleBox 3.5 stop at 10 devices.
I will test the same RPi 3B and this time MoodleBox 3.5 combination in a class, possibly the coming week.
In a spontaneous trial today we managed to connect exactly 13 devices to the MoodleBox WLAN. The device was a RPi 3B+, official 2.5 A power supply and MoodleBox 3.5.0. At about 11 devices, as reported in the MoodleBox dashboard, the devices were getting rejected. Students kept on trying and finally 13 devices were connected, not more. Either this is an inherent limit of the hardware or the device driver of the wireless interface.
I hope, we can achieve the limit 25 as reported in the discussion https://discuss.moodlebox.net/d/36-low-number-of-concurrent-connected-users. (Refer the sources linked to that discussion.)
Hi Ratna, thanks so much for your response. I saw from the various threads that many other persons seem to have the low amount of concurrent connections issue. I saw no suggestion in any of the threads that could solve the issue. My power supply is the high quality one shipped with the CanaKit Raspberry Pi 4 kit, so I know it's not a power issue.
Anyone has any suggestions which can allow more connections to occur e.g. use of a WiFi router etc?
Any help will be appreciated as we are looking for a good offline solution to use with our students here since Internet access is an issue.
Thanks in advance,
Keith
- Edited
keithlab We are hitting the limits of the built-in Wi-Fi interface, I believe. Other solutions which were discussed in this forum are:
- external OpenWRT router https://discuss.moodlebox.net/d/141-increasing-number-of-participants/9
- USB Wi-Fi adapters https://discuss.moodlebox.net/d/139-alfa-awus036ach-wifi-adapter-installation
- Edited
Thanks so much for the help Ratna!
I am about the try the solution you linked where we can connect a Router to the Pi using an ethernet cable. The router should allow more connections than the MoodleBox Pi Wifi and the ethernet can bypass the WiFi hardware limitations and allow more simultaneous connections to the MoodleBox web server.
keithlab There is a third suggesion https://discuss.moodlebox.net/d/156-anzahl-der-user-im-wlan, FYI.
- Edited
I had the same problem. My solution is a USB WiFi adapter. For this I switched off the internal WLAN.
It works with EDIMAX EW-7811UN Wireless USB Adapter and TB® Ralink 5370 USB Wifi Dongle. When I#m working with the Ralink Dongle, I had to adapt the hostapd.conf file.
I works at least with 17 clients, Before that there were only 10 clients.
In the next few weeks I will try a larger class with more students.
Here is my configuration in german.
Konfigurationsänderung Moodlebox mit USB Stick
Zugang per ssh (z.B. putty). Raspberry mit Internetanschluss über lan.
Update
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade -y
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
sudo nano /boot/config.txt
Folgendes am Ende ohne Anführungsstriche einfügen.
'# turn wifi and bluetooth off'
'dtoverlay=pi3-disable-wifi'
'dtoverlay=pi3-disable-bt'
Neustarten
sudo shutdown -r 0
Edimax
Läuft ohne weitere Veränderungen
Ralink
sudo apt-get install firmware-ralink
Änderung von hostapd.conf
sudo nano /etc/hostapd/hostapd.conf
Dann folgenden Eintrag ändern:
'# Enable 802.11n'
'# ieee80211n=1'