I think I fried the wifi on 4 boxes... I don't know what's going on

Help & Support Hardware
1

Hello all,
TLDR: Is coreelec killing the WIFI modules on the boxes or what?
first of all, I have 4 different players (S912, S905X, S905W at home. All of them are working correctly, and have a shared centralized DB. 3 of them are working from LAN, the other from wifi.
I am a long time user, I have been using AML boxes for years and years.
I wanted to clarify that this is not my first rodeo.

I recently wanted to gift a player to a friend, so I acquired an old S905X. I installed Coreelec, booted and was a bit surprised that the WIFI was not detected. After further inspection, not only the wifi was not detected, the network card itself is not visible/detected at all.
I thought maybe the box was broken… I returned it and got a S905W2
I installed the latest stable coreelec version… No wifi detected (I don’t mean the network, I mean the wifi card itself).
I thought maybe the drivers are not updated… so I tried a nightly, this time the wifi was detected correctly but the performance was just plain awful (around 100Kb of transfer speed, totally unusable).
I got an S905X4, same story, the current version did not detect anything, but the nightly did, unfortunately in this case the installation itself didn’t seem stable. The player seemed to hangup randomly (afterwards I realized that may have been an issue with the wifi and the samba access timing out). Returned it as well.
okeeey… last device, S905X3. Installed the last stable, and (I think) it did not detect anything, I installed the nightly (6 of January), and everything seemed to work correctly. Wifi card was detected and the network as responsive as expected… for about 2h.
After a reboot, the network card and the bluetooth have both disappeared.

Am I going crazy? is coreelec frying the cards? Any idea what is going on?

Edit: I am always working from the SDCard, not installing in the internal memory. Doing a reinstall of coreelec has no effect, the wifi interface is still missing.
Booting the box with the original Android shows the wifi disabled, when triying to enable it, it goes back to disabled by itself. Bluetooth is not detected either. As if the Wifi interface had dissapeared.

2

Some checks from the S905x3:

CoreELEC:~ # ip link show
1: lo: <LOOPBACK,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 65536 qdisc noqueue qlen 1
    link/loopback 00:00:00:00:00:00 brd 00:00:00:00:00:00
2: eth0: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP8000> mtu 1500 qdisc fq_codel qlen 1000
    link/ether c4:2a:fe:04:53:52 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
CoreELEC:~ # ifconfig -a
eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr C4:2A:FE:04:53:52
          inet addr:10.0.0.76  Bcast:10.0.0.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:669 errors:0 dropped:41 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:508 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
          RX bytes:97284 (95.0 KiB)  TX bytes:69999 (68.3 KiB)
          Interrupt:14

lo        Link encap:Local Loopback
          inet addr:127.0.0.1  Mask:255.0.0.0
          inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host
          UP LOOPBACK RUNNING  MTU:65536  Metric:1
          RX packets:36 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:36 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1
          RX bytes:12463 (12.1 KiB)  TX bytes:12463 (12.1 KiB)

CoreELEC:~ # ls /sys/class/net
eth0  lo

I can also see this in DMESG:

CoreELEC:~ # dmesg | grep -i dhd
[    0.644775@3]- Wifi: bcmdhd_init_wlan_mem: [dhd] STATIC-MSG) bcmdhd_init_wlan_mem : 101.10.361.10 (wlan=r892223-20210623-1)
[    0.645707@3]- Wifi: bcmdhd_init_wlan_mem: [dhd] STATIC-MSG) bcmdhd_init_wlan_mem : prealloc ok: 8162304(7971K)
3

As a proof of concept it works correctly with an external USB.
This is not an ideal solution, as this box only has 2 USB ports, but it makes me think that there’s definitely some issue with the drivers.

Hardware logs available here: (the dtb is 2gigs, the box actually has 4gigs of ram, wanted to try a different one to see if that makes any difference, it doesn’t).
https://paste.coreelec.org/scrabbledreamed