Flaky Radio

Technical Programming
1

There are two locations at which we test our robot.

At Location1, everything is hunky-dory. We get “green” on communications, Robot Code and Joystick and everything works as expected. (http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=20141&stc=1&d=1456155368)

At location2, communication becomes flaky. We get half green and half red on communications. (http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=20142&stc=1&d=1456155368) The %loss on communications shoots up from almost 0% to 75% and obviously the robot behaves erratically (http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=20143&stc=1&d=1456155368).

Would you have any insight as to what is going on with the radio at Location2? How do I debug the issue? Is there a way to circumvent the given situation and force persistent connection to the radio? Please let me know.

Thanks for your help.

Chet

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2

If your location based diagnosis is correct than it is most likely due to two different things

  1. An excess of strong WiFi networks that are interfering with the communications of the router (an example of this would be the schools internet distribution network

  2. EMF feedback (sometimes from certain heavy machines or if the room has a lot of non bouncable material eg aluminum)

3

Please post photos of the good and bad locations in the robot.

4

You can switch to 5GHz at the troublesome location if your laptop is 5GHz capable.

You can use InSSIDer to see what AP conflicts are active at your troublesome location.
Then you can browse to the OpenMesh and move it to the least used channel within the 2.4GHz band.

5

Mark:

Thanks for your help.

Along with insider I also used the Chanalyzer to perform the spectrum analysis and moved to a channel that was least used (with 5 GHz radio). That seems to have solved it. It took me a while because I don’t go to warehouse that often. Your help is really appreciated.

Best Regards,

Chet