Hey all,
I’ve been having intermittent wifi connection drops for over a year. I replaced my consumer-grade wifi router once to no avail. I then decided to up my game, and got a commercial grade rig (Ubiquiti’s UniFi stack). The problems lessened, but have become more frequent. Today, UniFi alerted me that it had picked up radar (the commercial grade rigs give you much better trouble shooting information). That’s also about when my FarmBot abruptly went offline today and rebooted***. That’s when the light bulb went off: our home is in one the landing patterns for a nearby commercial airport (we’re also in the 20 mi range of a military airport). WiFi operates in the same unrestricted portions of the spectrum and plays second fiddle to the radar-used portions, since landing planes or detecting other planes to shoot down, are more important than outdoor internet access, so more advanced routers will try to switch channels. Read this article, particularly the opening section and the “A Wi-Fi Router That Dodges Radar and Interference” section.
My new theory is that some of the more powerful radars (weather or otherwise) on these planes and reflections coming from the airport’s radar, may be causing the router to switch channels and the RasPi’s network stack cannot keep up. Or it’s just plan overloading the RasPi’s wifi stack.
So now comes the ask: have any of you who have been experiencing wifi issue live near an airport? Are any of you using a commercial grade network rig (Ubiquiti, Cisco, etc) and have some advanced metrics that you can share?
*** Every time this happens, I have to spend about 10 minutes getting the FarmBot to the real 0,0,0 and resetting home. This is done by either
- cajoling the stop at home setting, and allowing positive numbers on the z axis, and continuosly get FB back to origin, setting home, and then return to the ‘stop at home’ and ‘negative only’ on the z-axis settings to their original)
- cajoling the z axis per above and then manually moving FB back into x0 and y0
This is extremely irritating. From what I can gather reading through the forum, this behavior of assuming where ever FB is at boot is 0,0,0, is by design. Is there a way we can have the option to save the current position across reboots? If so, I can create a topic in the Feature Request portion of the forum.