Changing WiFi Channel on OM5P-AC Radio?

Technical Technical Discussion
#1

So I need to move our AP from channel 11 to another channel because it is being interfered with another wifi network on channels 1 6 and 11. This is something that we did all of the time with the D-links in order to avoid packet loss in the areas we run our robots for demos that have existing WIFI networks.

From our WIFI Analzier we can see the radio is on channel 11, along with a lot of other WIFI networks, and the radio doesn’t auto move to a better channel.

I’ve noticed once the OM5P radios are flashed to the FRc custom OpenWRT firmware, that firmware disables all ports except for port 53 and port 8888. So there is no web interface, no Telnet, no ssh, no nothing. Nothing that allows me to easily move the channel from 11 to something esle.

So without an interface to the device I thought the solution would be to remove the FRC firmware for a default OpenWRT or default OM5P firmware.

But, I cant even overwrite the firmware to a non-FRC firmware because using the FRC config utilitly fails when I try to trick it in loading the default OM5P firmware from the vendor.

I would image port 8888 is used by the FRC Radio config util to have a protocol which performs a checksum on the bin file, and then does a transfer which is probably why trying to load a non-FRC firmware fails.

I have tried to use the AP51-flash.exe tool as well but it just gets stuck on “listening”. I would imagine since all protocols are disabled were locked out of overwriting the device, but why?

I think there is another open-mesh-flash-ng tool that i will try again later but in the mean time…

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

All I want to do is change the WIFI channel from 11 to 7, this can’t be that hard.

Thanks,
Kevin

#2

If the radio is the older one (OM5P-AN) the 2016 home radio tool can be used to reload the pre-restricted firmware.
Or you can just copy over the 2016 firmware.bin from that old tool or the OpenWRT firmware to the current home radio tool and let it install it for you.
I haven’t tried it with the newer OM5P-AC radio, but it might be worth a try.
Then you get the web server back.

I usually just switch to a different non-OM5P AP.

#3

There is another alternative that has proven to work really well. It requires that you purchase a WiFi router such as the one used for FMS.
We did this and flashed it with OpenWRT. We then configured both the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands to channels that were not interfering with, or being interfered by, another WiFi system. One key point to know if you intend this to replicate FMS as closely as possible, make sure you set each band to use “N” mode, not “AC”. AC provides wider bandwidths, thus it may give a false sense of success in your network performance that you may not have on the field.

Then set up the OM5P in “FMS-Lite” mode to connect to your AP.

This approach allows you to define what channel(s) to use.
In our shop, we can now load code, drive, stream video all wireless.

#4

Thank you everyone for the replies. We did not solve the initial question but did do a work around.

Here is what we did:

  1. We reverted to an OM5P-AN radio (2016 radio)
  2. Installed the 2016 Kickoff Radio Config Utility (which came with the 2016 radio firmware before openMesh locked access down). All Radio config tools are available on teamforge just google search.
  3. Flash and configured the radio using the FRC tool.

This allowed us to have web access to the OM5P-AN radio and allowed us to change the channel.

Some things we noted:

  1. OM5P-AN was by default set to auto channel, and moved off to a better channel.

  2. We tried to use a combination of old and new firmware with old and new flashing utilities (nothing allowed us to flash the OM5P-AC (2017) radios. I think the last resort would be to open the device and flash using JTAG to get control over the OM5P-AC device. Or maybe use the OpenMesh cloud tool which I haven’t looked into.

  3. In our testing the 2017 firmware on OM5P-AC was not set to auto channel, but there was no way to confirm other than using our WIFI analyizer which we never saw move to a less active channel.

In the future if we want to use the OM5P-AC radios in the presents of other WIFI networks, we will be forced to do what was suggested and use the OM5P-AC as a bridge to another wifi router to control the channel of communication. Just seems like a needless step. Right now we took all OM5P-AC out of service and replaced them with D-links or other radios.

Thanks for the help,
Kevin

#5