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qca / open-plc-utils

Qualcomm Atheros Open Powerline Toolkit.
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Can't List TPLink Devices #172

Closed jamstruth closed 1 year ago

jamstruth commented 1 year ago

Hello,

I've been trying to get this application working to diagnose some issues with my TPLink PA9020P Powerline devices but I can't get any kind of network topology out of the system. Is there something I've missed?

When running plcstat -t I get no output and running plcstat -m gives the following error: plcstat: NetworkInformation2: Read timeout or network error

vbudko commented 1 year ago

Hi,

Why do you think Qualcomm PLC utilities should work for Broadcom based device? Qualcomm often uses Vendor Specific MMEs.

jamstruth commented 1 year ago

Hi,

Why do you think Qualcomm PLC utilities should work for Broadcom based device? Qualcomm often uses Vendor Specific MMEs.

Truthfully this is all my bad for not reading into this far enough. Finding which SoC is used by a given powerline connector is difficult and TPLink devices all use different SoCs.

I also did not notice that this was an official Qualcomm repo. When you go looking for alternative tools this is one of the first results.

natevw commented 1 year ago

Yes! I was getting all sorts of unexpected errors despite working around my VLAN setup and having had success on other routers:

plctool: Identity2: Read timeout or network error

and

plcstat: LinkStatistics: Read timeout or network error

Turns out that some TP-Link devices (e.g. the two I have that are combo Powerline/WiFi AP) are QCA-based and compatible with these tools, while others (e.g. the plain Ethernet-Powerline transceivers) are not compatible!

In my research I came across https://deviwiki.com/wiki/List_of_PowerLine_Devices (via https://superuser.com/questions/1629114/how-does-enumerating-powerline-adapters-work#comment2488683_1629192) which can be helpful for figuring out which chipset one might be trying to communicate with.