Banglalion Modem Running on NanoPi Neo

Recently I got a Nanopi Neo with Allwinner H3 SoC, 512MB RAM, 1 USB-A port and 1 Ethernet port. I am using Armbian as OS which is based on Debian.

I did a test if it was possible to run Banglalion WiMAX devices on this platform. So I grabbed Beceem WiMAX API sources and built it using gcc-linaro-5.2-2015.11-2-x86_64_arm-linux-gnueabihf toolchain.

First I had to build the Armbian kernel with Staging > BCM_WIMAX module. Then I dumped the image into a microsd card, put it into my NanoPi Neo and booted up.

I wasn't sure which IP it got, so I ran nmap to find it out.

root@minhaz-desktop:~# nmap -sn 10.42.0.1/24
Starting Nmap 6.40 ( http://nmap.org ) at 2016-08-07 01:10 BDT
Nmap scan report for 10.42.0.28
Host is up (0.00027s latency).
MAC Address: 46:A0:87:0F:06:B6 (Unknown)
Nmap scan report for 10.42.0.1
Host is up.
Nmap done: 256 IP addresses (2 hosts up) scanned in 19.06 seconds

Then I logged into it. Checked its memory and CPU information.

root@nanopineo:/# free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:           495         90        404          8          5         43
-/+ buffers/cache:         42        453
Swap:            0          0          0
root@nanopineo:/# nproc 
4
root@nanopineo:/# lscpu 
Architecture:          armv7l
Byte Order:            Little Endian
CPU(s):                4
On-line CPU(s) list:   0-3
Thread(s) per core:    1
Core(s) per socket:    4
Socket(s):             1
CPU max MHz:           1200.0000
CPU min MHz:           480.0000

I built the necessary library, daemons, clients etc which can be found at mdminhazulhaque/beceem-cscm-armv7. Let's install them.

Copy libeap_supplicant.so, libengine_beceem.so and libxvi020.so to /lib
Copy macxvi.cfg and macxvi200.bin to /lib/firmware
Copy wimaxd and wimaxc to /usr/local/bin as executable
Copy wimaxd.conf to /etc and change UserIdentity, UserPassword and TTLSAnonymousIdentity to your own config
Put bilai.pem to /etc (Use your head, ask questions or search the internet for it)

Now let's run the total setup.

Plug in the modem (obviously!)
Run wimaxd -c /etc/wimaxd.conf
From another terminal, run wimaxc connect 2600 10 to connect
If connection is established, run dhclient eth1 to lease IP from the modem (assuming that eth1 is the WiMAX device)

Here is a photo of my little buddy and the Bilai modem.

Banglalion Modem on ARM