Limited number of WiFi clients

[colinsauze]

There is a bug/feature with the Raspberry Pi's built in WiFi that limits the number of clients. See raspberrypi/linux#3010 for more details. A potential workaround is to switch to the minimal wifi card firmware, see https://github.com/RPi-Distro/firmware-nonfree/tree/bullseye/debian/config/brcm80211/cypress. Another possibility is to use an external USB WiFi adaptor.

[colinsauze]

To find the number of connected clients run

iw dev wlan0 station dump | grep Station | wc -l

[raehik]

We tried switching to this minimal firmware on an up-to-date Pi Zero using the command given in the nonfree firmware repo

sudo update-alternatives --config cyfmac43455-sdio.bin

and selecting the *-minimal* option, then restarting (and confirmed that the minimal firmware appeared selected). But on a device connection test, we ended up with the same 9-10 possible connections before new connections are disallowed.