I would like to ask for advice on how to improve the wifi connectivity of our two Farmbots Genesis v1.5. They are installed on the roof of a university’s nine story building, where the wifi signal is weak and there is a lot of interference. I cannot use ethernet cable from the university network or move the wifi transmitter closer to the Farmbots.
My idea is to use an outdoor Access Point in Client mode, connected to each Farmbot with an ethernet cable. The Access Point can be placed near the wifi transmitter.
Has anyone tried this solution before? What kind of Access Point would you recommend?
Your looking for a “wireless bridge” for two farmbot’s you shouldn’t need anything too crazy, just the right number of ports. Though to be honest I think a wifi extender would be the best/cheapest option. Some of the bridges get crazy expensive. If you have a router that can do client mode of course you could use that but most home routers do not.
I am a student at a school as well, and restored a farmbot that had been sitting in a greenhouse doing absolutely nothing besides collecting dust. At first, like you, I connected it to the school’s wifi, but the router is inside a building roughly fifty feet away, and the school’s wifi range sucks. My solution was to run an ethernet cable to a switch and then into the farmbot, but that doesn’t seem to work for you. As long as the routers at your university have the ports available for an SSH connection, you should only need a wifi bridge or range extender. Note that setting up again will require you to check if ports 80, 443, and 8883 are open. Contact your IT department for help- even though they might not do anything, they will provide help. Mine was nice enough to run an ethernet cable from the router to the greenhouse as an integrated port.