I have a Clear Spot 4G+ WiFi hotspot (similar to Sprint Overdrive a.k.a. Sierra Wireless W801) which I want to access over its USB connection (which implements USB CDC Ethernet class). My goal is to allow the Clear’s WiFi to be turned off and have all traffic go through the ethernet and/or WiFi of the RouterBOARD currently running ROS 5.24 (although I’m willing to update to betas).
When I plug the device in the /port print command locks up (which in theory it shouldn’t because the device does not have serial connections, only ethernet). I also don’t see anything under /interface or /interface lte.
/system resource usb print detail
0 device=“1:1” name=“RB400 EHCI” serial-number=“rb400_usb” vendor-id=“0x1d6b” device-id=“0x0002” speed=“480 Mbps” ports=1
usb-version=“2.00”
1 device=“1:3” name=“Sierra Wireless Tethered Hotspot” vendor-id=“0x1199” device-id=“0x0029” speed=“480 Mbps” ports=0
usb-version=“2.00”
Using devel access I determined that the cdc_ether.ko is not loading and sierra.ko is. But that’s a problem because sierra.ko is for the legacy serial devices which has nothing to do with this device as far as I know.
When I plug it in to my Mac (10.8.3) it just works. IORegistryExplorer shows the same info as the routerboard (1199/0029) with device class 2 (CDC) and it’s clearly using the AppleUSBCDC driver.
It’s also worth pointing out that to get to this point I disabled “TRU-Install” in the admin interface while I had it connected over Wi-Fi. This seems to help with device recognition as TRU-Install is one of those crazy Windows-specific “features” that hides the device from the computer until it has positive confirmation that their proprietary driver is installed.
I feel like I’m so close to getting this working and the fact that it just works as a plain old CDC device on OS X seems to be a very positive indication that it could just work on a Linux system. Any help would be greatly appreciated.