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ALLO USBridge Signature


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1 hour ago, SgtDuke said:

The case and documentation seem to imply that the two USB ports on the front are only for WiFi or BT dongles.  Is this correct or will any USB devices work with these ports, such as keyboard, mouse, hard drive with music files, etc.?

I attached a Seagate Backup Plus 4GB USB drive to each of the WiFi/BT ports, and it appeared as /dev/sda /dev/sda1. A /dev/sg0 device also appeared, which I don't understand.  I was able to mount the disk and read it. I did not try to write it yet.

 

As I experimented and tried to figure out the best automounting method, it seemed that attaching and detaching may have messed up the rest of the file system on some occasions. But I don't have enough clear data to diagnose the problem yet. It always cleared up with a reboot. After a dietpi-update, the next attach/detach event did not cause a problem. That may be just random variation, or there may have been a fix to a file system bug in the update.

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 10/15/2019 at 3:16 AM, allo.com said:

Hardware wise...yes. Driver is available in Rasbian . However from all the players , I think that PCP removed most of the drivers to make it light weight (so for PCP you need to add it manually)

Can you point to instructions for finding and installing the driver? On my Lenovo laptop running Ubuntu, the relevant drivers appear to come from a linux-modules-extra-* package with lots of irrelevant ones. None of them is called 8192eu, but my system recognizes the rtl8192eu dongle, so perhaps it is a more generic driver?

 

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On 10/5/2019 at 5:45 PM, odonnell said:

I attached a Seagate Backup Plus 4GB USB drive to each of the WiFi/BT ports, and it appeared as /dev/sda /dev/sda1. A /dev/sg0 device also appeared, which I don't understand.  I was able to mount the disk and read it. I did not try to write it yet.

 

As I experimented and tried to figure out the best automounting method, it seemed that attaching and detaching may have messed up the rest of the file system on some occasions. But I don't have enough clear data to diagnose the problem yet. It always cleared up with a reboot. After a dietpi-update, the next attach/detach event did not cause a problem. That may be just random variation, or there may have been a fix to a file system bug in the update.

Further experience:

 

The USB disk unmounted spontaneously in the middle of an O!MPD database update. I suspect problem, such as insufficient power, with the "WiFI/BT" port. I had a similar experience with the same model of USB disk on some of the USB ports on my laptop, while other ports appeared to be reliable. I have not studied this problem further. I am automounting with udisks2 and udiskie, and I may have had initial problems with that configuration, so that confuses the issue.

 

I now run the USB disk on a separately powered (2.5 Amp) USB hub, along with a WiFi dongle. I had to introduce the hub because the WiFi dongle is wide, and blocks the second "WiFi/BT" port, but the extra power may be helpful also. I have run the disk for a very long time in this fashion without problem.

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  • 1 month later...
10 hours ago, allo.com said:

On the WIFI/BT ports , please do not use anything thats noisy (and yes that means some keyboards)...this is why we marked as wifi/bt. If you have to use them please remove them after usage.

 

  You can use those ports without a problem on wifi/bt dongles .

 

Do you regard USB powered disk drives as "noisy" for this purpose? What about powered USB hubs?

 

I currently have a powered USB hub connected to one of the WIFI/BT ports, with the Allo-supplied Wi-Fi dongle and a Seagate Backup+ Portable 5 Gb disk, which contains the 2 Gb of music that I play. I added the powered hub because the Wi-Fi dongle is wide and when it is in one of the WIFI/BT ports it obstructs the other one. The hub has also probably prevented occasional spontaneous unmounts of the disk that I experienced early on with the disk directly connected to the WIFI/BT port, no dongle present. I did not diagnose those unmounts carefully, so they could also have been due to system configuration that I changed later.

 

I have not noticed a noise that I would associate with the WIFI/BT ports. I have some bad ambient noise from my refrigerator which would mask subtle problems in the sound system, and I may be more sensitive next year when I move to a quieter house.

 

If this is not a good way to connect a USB disk, please suggest the better approach.

 

Thanks,

 

Mike O'Donnell

 

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  • 1 month later...
  • 5 weeks later...
44 minutes ago, Lokust said:

Hello again - best practice for turning off the USBridge sig + Shanti? 
 

Thanks!


 

 

We discussed this briefly in another thread: https://audiophilestyle.com/forums/topic/57387-safe-shutdown-for-allo-rpi-systems/?tab=comments#comment-1007005

 

Bottom line: nobody seems to really know. The issue seems to be more a general Raspberry Pi issue than USBridge in particular. I learned over many years to avoid powering computer systems down without positive verification that the system has done a clean termination. That appears to be impossible with Raspberry Pi. If the disc activity light stops flashing for 30 seconds after a shutdown command, it seems that the system has terminated, but no way to be sure. It also seems that little or no harm occurs if you just disconnect power, but I have my ingrained prejudice against that approach.

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  • 3 months later...

I also don't care for NAS. I reported on a successful USB-disk configuration here:

Allo staff have commented elsewhere on connections to the USB WiFi port. Two potential problems are injection of noise into the USBridge Signature and insufficient power for the disk. I may have experienced the power problem in early experiments, but I introduced a separate powered USB Hub and found the power sufficient. I expect that SD storage takes less power than my spinning disk, but that's a wild guess. I have no idea about the noise question. I never noticed any noise, but I have the impression that Allo worries about electronically detectable noise whether or not they are sure that a listener actually hears it.

 

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  • 1 year later...

On my USBridge Signature running dietpi based on Debian stretch, I am warned that stretch will no longer be supported, and I need to update to buster, and presumably onward to bullseye. Are there any special considerations for doing this update on the Allo system? dietpi recommends a fresh OS install, but unless I am reassured that this will not destroy important Allo customization, I will probably do the incremental update in place. Any tips from experience will be greatly appreciated. I expect that Allo is now shipping systems based on bullseye, but I haven't seen any discussion of the Debian version anywhere.

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