[thansen]

How to mount an external antenna on Cubox/Vero

Edit: Remember taking the Cubox apart or modifying it will Void Warranty

The other day I mounted a external antenna on my Vero/Cubox. Posted some pictures of it on the Vero thread, fritsch saw it and asked me to do make an howto. So here it goes.
Note that I already had the antenna mounted when I made this "howto" and I did not take pictures with this howto in mind, but I hope the pictures I took will be helpful.

Tools I used

Small screw driver
Phillips PH0 screw driver
8mm wrench
A file
A plier
Sheet metal scissor
Cordless drill
Various drills

Materials needed

Antenna http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/New-2400-2500M...4629c510fe
U.FL Mini PCI to RP-SMA Pigtail Antenna WiFi Cable http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/2-X-U-FL-Mini-...33792437ef


To take the Cubox apart, you have to remove the rubber feets to get access to the screws. The rubber feet's are normally square.
But as you can see I cut of the corners, so I don't have to remove them again if I should have to take it apart.


It can be a little hard to get the the internals out of the case. You can use a small screw driver as leverage to help get it out. Just be careful not to damage anything and only use it on the aluminium parts NOT the PCB.
And remember to disconnect the internal antenna (the wire on top left)


To make room for the antenna connector inside the case, it is necessary to modify the alu-frame, and as it acts as a heat sink I did not want to remove any of it.
Luckily there is enough room to just make a cut, and bent it inwards.
I don't think it is necessary to remove the circuit boards to make the cut, but I did it as I was curious about the hardware (I always take things apart :-) )


Now for the Antenna.
I removed the old antenna, it was fastened with double sided tape, and can could easily be broken of with a knife or a screw driver.
I made a 6.5mm hole in the case, aprox. 10mm from the top and 16mm in.
Be very very careful when you drill in plastic, especially if you are using a new and sharp drill bit, it can "bite" the plastic and if you are unlucky you can damage the case.
It made the hole in three steps starting with a small drill bit, and so on.


Now it's time to put it back together, be careful not damage the antenna wire, it has to go through the case the same way as the built in antenna did.
The white antenna is quite large (18cm) to comparison the black is only 9cm long, so maybe it is a better choice and fits the Cubox/Vero better, if I can find one in white.



Hope this post can be useful to someone, fell free to ask if there should be questions or comments.

[thansen]

How to enlarge the SPDIF hole

As some of you may have experienced when trying to connect a SPDIF optical cable to the CuBox, it won't fit because the hole in the casing is to small.
I had the same problem, and decided to make the hole bigger. Here is how I did it.



Tools used

Masking tape
A small flat file
A Utility knife
And a pen


Put the masking tape over the SPDIF connector, and cut inside the hole.
Take the cable and put it in as far as it goes, and use the pen to draw outside the connector, so you can see how much material needs to be removed.


Take the Cubox apart as described above and enlarge the hole with the file.
You can choose to only remove the material needed to make the connector fit, but this will make the hole look "funny" in my opinion, so I decided to make the square.


Before And after


Hope this post can be useful to someone, fell free to ask if there should be questions or comments.

[fritsch]

Thank you very much. Out of curiosity. Can you move the cubox to a place with good reception and copy some files / measure the throughput with this new antenna? As I have a non modded cubox, I can produce some measurements also and we could compare?

Edit: And before I forget, also please include that this (obviously) voids warranty.

[un1versal]

Have you considered using a flat directional antenna and place cubox onto? Sort of like a base.

[thansen]

Thank you very much. Out of curiosity. Can you move the cubox to a place with good reception and copy some files / measure the throughput with this new antenna? As I have a non modded cubox, I can produce some measurements also and we could compare?

Edit: And before I forget, also please include that this (obviously) voids warranty.

Thanks, you are right, I forgot the warranty thing.

I will be happy to make some tests later today, is there some kind of benchmark tools for this, or do I simply copy the file and measure the time? I'm not an Linux expert :-)

[fritsch]

Academical tests like iperf or something don't present the whole picture. They are good to see the throughput with a certain package size. So, everyday's life tests are what most users want to see. I would just copy 1gb via samba and via nfs 10 times. And test video playback while copying with ~ 1MB/s, scp has a bitrate /s parameter.

I never got more than 2.5 MB/s on my cubox, so I think if you are superior with the new antenna, that's already fine (*)

Code:

Intel Hardware:
dd if=/dev/urandom of=1gb.dat bs=1M count=1024
fritsch@t440s:~$time  scp -c blowfish-cbc 1gb.dat fritsch@jabba:
fritsch@jabba's password:
1gb.dat                                       100% 1024MB  13.5MB/s   01:16    

real    1m22.408s
user    0m16.628s
sys    0m2.604s

Result: 1024 MB / 82.408 s = 12.426 MB/s

* Fritz Box 300 Mbit/s box, where I get average throughput of ~ 12 MB/s on my intel notebook. This scp test is not to find "max throughput", but to see if there is stable throughput over a certain period of time.

Edit: The dd command might need half an hour on the vero/cubox, alternatively you can use /dev/zero as input

Update:

Cubox results:

Code:

time scp -c blowfish-cbc 1gb.dat fritsch@jabba:
fritsch@jabba's password:
1gb.dat                                       100% 1024MB   2.4MB/s   07:13    
real    7m 16.38s
user    1m 8.52s
sys    0m 23.30s

1024 MB / 436.38 s = 2.347 MB / s

Curious if you can beat that. I put the box into the same location as before, when testing with intel hw.

[thansen]

Cubox results:

Code:

time scp -c blowfish-cbc 1gb.dat fritsch@jabba:
fritsch@jabba's password:
1gb.dat                                       100% 1024MB   2.4MB/s   07:13    
real    7m 16.38s
user    1m 8.52s
sys    0m 23.30s

1024 MB / 436.38 s = 2.347 MB / s

Curious if you can beat that. I put the box into the same location as before, when testing with intel hw.

I just ran the test test ten times on a mounted NFS share on a Synology NAS with the following entry in fstab

Code:

192.168.1.7:/volume1/xbmc             /mnt/nfs-syn     nfs rsize=8192,tcp,cto,noatime,intr,x-systemd.automount,noauto,nfsvers=3 0 0

My router is an Asus RT-AC68U

Code:

osmc@osmc:~$ cat /proc/version
Linux version 3.14.37-14-osmc (root@vero) (gcc version 4.9.2 (Debian 4.9.2-10) ) #1 SMP Mon May 18 05:54:43 UTC 2015
osmc@osmc:~$ dd if=/dev/urandom of=1gb.dat bs=1M count=1024
1024+0 records in
1024+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 416.742 s, 2.6 MB/s
osmc@osmc:~$ time scp -c blowfish-cbc 1gb.dat /mnt/nfs-syn

real    4m23.654s
user    0m0.041s
sys     0m7.882s
osmc@osmc:~$ time scp -c blowfish-cbc 1gb.dat /mnt/nfs-syn

real    4m28.232s
user    0m0.026s
sys     0m7.677s
osmc@osmc:~$ time scp -c blowfish-cbc 1gb.dat /mnt/nfs-syn

real    4m26.942s
user    0m0.041s
sys     0m8.220s
osmc@osmc:~$ time scp -c blowfish-cbc 1gb.dat /mnt/nfs-syn

real    4m39.822s
user    0m0.037s
sys     0m8.072s
osmc@osmc:~$ time scp -c blowfish-cbc 1gb.dat /mnt/nfs-syn

real    4m29.523s
user    0m0.030s
sys     0m8.114s
osmc@osmc:~$ time scp -c blowfish-cbc 1gb.dat /mnt/nfs-syn

real    4m29.578s
user    0m0.036s
sys     0m8.462s
osmc@osmc:~$ time scp -c blowfish-cbc 1gb.dat /mnt/nfs-syn

real    4m25.723s
user    0m0.040s
sys     0m8.012s
osmc@osmc:~$ time scp -c blowfish-cbc 1gb.dat /mnt/nfs-syn

real    4m33.379s
user    0m0.036s
sys     0m8.163s
osmc@osmc:~$ time scp -c blowfish-cbc 1gb.dat /mnt/nfs-syn

real    4m29.550s
user    0m0.039s
sys     0m7.756s
osmc@osmc:~$ time scp -c blowfish-cbc 1gb.dat /mnt/nfs-syn

real    4m25.323s
user    0m0.033s
sys     0m8.063s

Average about 270 sec.

Result 1024 / 270s =  3.7925 MB/s

The dd command only took about 7 minutes.

Code:

osmc@osmc:~$ time dd if=/dev/urandom of=1gb.dat bs=1M count=1024
1024+0 records in
1024+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 418.042 s, 2.6 MB/s

real    6m58.252s
user    0m0.015s
sys     6m54.017s
osmc@osmc:~$

Samba test and playback test comes later :-)

[thansen]

From a test I asked one of the users on the OSMC forum to do, it seems like the aluminium frame inside the Cubox has a big impact on WIFI reception. By laying down the Cubox, so that the top of the Cubox is pointing in the direction of the router, the WIFI reception was greatly improved.



I guess it's not the best design, and has definitely not been tested very well by the designer/manufacturer of the Cubox.

[fritsch]

Hehe - this will alter the CIR port nuts ... but yeah, if you don't use it anyways - fine.

[un1versal]

From a test I asked one of the users on the OSMC forum to do, it seems like the aluminium frame inside the Cubox has a big impact on WIFI reception. By laying down the Cubox, so that the top of the Cubox is pointing in the direction of the router, the WIFI reception was greatly improved.



I guess it's not the best design, and has definitely not been tested very well by the designer/manufacturer of the Cubox.

What a terrible, horrible design, one would think (common knowledge) metalic structures both external and internal has some Faraday effect and is a terrible thing for radio signals.