[Soekris] WiFi card failures in 4526's

[Joshua ChaitinPollak]

Hello,

First off, does the Soekris have a temperature sensor or CPU  
throttling ablities? How would I go about accessing that information  
via Linux?

Next, we are producing a product that uses Soekris 4526 boards with  
Wistron NeWeb CM9 WiFi Mini-PCI cards as the wireless radio. (Sorry  
for the flood of acronyms). We have about 75 of these setup right now  
with plans to make many, many more. Out of these 75, we've had 5 of  
the Mini-PCI WiFi cards die, and we are trying to figure out why.

When they fail, the Atheros chipset generally gives an error message  
about the card's EEPROM being invalid, and thats it. Swapping in a  
new MiniPCI card fixes the problem, and if we put the bad card in  
another Soekris it still reports as bad.

I'm concerned it could be a heat issue, but I was wondering if dirty  
power could somehow ruin the wifi card without affecting the Soekris?

Currently, the cards and mounted in the slot directly above the AMD  
chip, although I have suggested moving the cards to the other slot.  
The cards are rated at a max of 70 degrees Celsius, which sounds  
reasonable, but we haven't done any temperature testing yet.

Thanks for any help you might be able to provide,

Josh

-- 
Joshua ChaitinPollak
Software Engineer
Kiva Systems