I configured the on board wifi access point on my Orange Pi Lite, (WPA / WPA2 encrypted, hostapd, dnsmasq).

Everything was fine. I could power the board, connect to its wi-fi and ssh into it.

 

Just a day ago I connected to the board with ssh, just to test that it was working and closed the connection immediately. So I know that it should be working and that all the configs are good.

 

But now I keep on getting Connection Timed Out error, tested under Arch Linux and Mac (as the connecting clients).

Under arch linux my card finds the wi-fi, finds its bssid  and gets to sending an "ASSOCIATING" request which gets a Timeout response.

 

It does not seem to be a hardware failure, because the wi-fi is still created and is visible.

Config files also have not changed since the last time it worked. Any ideas?

 

It turned out to be a problem with electricity. I was using a usb extension cable to power the board and the cable is about 1.2 meters in length. This was causing some I-dont-know-what power issue and the board would just shut down randomly (I guess when it tried to bring up the wifi interface?). Removing the long cable and connecting the board to the power supply with a 10cm cable fixed everything.

 

This boards really, really need their power supply! The hungry bastards!!

It turned out to be a problem with electricity. ... This boards really, really need their power supply! The hungry bastards!!

Wrong! These boards don't need much power but unfortunately people love to put insanely crappy cables between PSU and device and due to cable and contact resistance then huge voltage drops happen even with slight consumption increases that affect stability of the board. Well, sometimes also crappy PSUs are used too.