WGA600N/WRT160N intermittent connection issues?

Technical Control System
1

Hi folks-

We seem to have an intermittent problem with our wireless connection.

We were happy to get our PC, the wireless router, the bridge, and the cRio all together, and even the camera. All happy, two days ago.

When testing out our rig in the wireless mode, the team complained wireless wasn’t working anymore. They worked in tethered mode, and were able to do some testing.

I came in, tested the connections, and things were OK… for a while.

Doing some ping tests, it seemed…

Ping 10.x.y.10 (laptop) OK
Ping 10.x.y.4 (wireless router) OK (of course, we are wired to it); setup with our team number as SSID
Ping 10.x.y.1 (wireless bridge) - on and off;
Ping 10.x.y.2 (robot) hardly ever - (but it can be ping’d intermittently when Mercury is retrograde, or somethin’)

Obviously, if I connect the bridge directly to the PC, I can see it. Can the school wireless network be causing problems?

I saw a reference to a gaming adapter mode on the WGA600N, with a web timeout of “15”. Any other thoughts?

Just before I sent this message, I rebooted the wireless router and bridge, and I seem to get communication all the way to the robot. But I had done this in the past, thinking this solved the problem.

I’m just worried that we might hit this wall again…

A.

2

The section 2 of the control system manual has you set the channel of the router to auto. If you do have other wireless networks in the area, you may be better off setting the router to a specific channel that is far away from other wireless networks.

3

Does the robot not ping while the bridge can be pinged?

4

We have had the same problem however we think our problem is related to not having enough power for the bridge. We are in Australia and because of the problems of shipping lead-acid battery FIRST sent it through a local supplier. The batteries that we have are 12 Volts and 7 Amps (as opposed to the 12 Volts and 18 Amps of the proper batteries) and as the Bridge requires 12 Volts 1 Amp (from memory) we periodically don’t have enough power for the Bridge.

However your in the US and have the right batteries this probably isn’t the same problem.

We also have replaced the Ethernet Cable that came in the KoP as that was also dropping the connection.

Thanks,
timytamy

5

We have had another look at our problem and after a few hours of trouble shooting we worked out that our uni’s wi-fi was causing the problems… not our batteries. To solve this we changed our routers channel to 4 as its not used that often.

Hope that helps,
timytamy

6

To all,

The problem is quite definitely FIRST’s advice to switch the router channel to “Auto”. We use the same router at work so we don’t have to run wired ethernet to every machine we’re building, and I ran into a similar problem. Our wireless routers were set for “Auto” channel selection as well, and I had difficulties getting one of the WGA600N bridges to connect consistently. Much searching on linksys’s forums turned up this suggestion, and once we switched our routers to fixed channels, the problem went away.

That said, I have some specific advice about WHICH channel to pick for your router. 802.11b/g/n is a rather wide band signal, which means that your router takes up more than just the one channel you set it to. It actually takes up about 5 channels worth of bandwidth. So a router on channel 1 and a router on channel 2 are horribly interfering with each other. You end up need to space routers 5 channels apart to get good clean bandwidth for each router.

This means you should pick channel 1, 6, or 11 for your router, because that’s what virtually every IT department out there is going to be doing as well to minimize interference. If channels 1, 6, and 11 are all being used in your immediate vicinity, DON’T try to shoehorn your router into, say channel 4. This means traffic from channels 1 and 6 are just noise that your router has to try to talk over. INSTEAD, pick whichever of channels 1, 6, and 11 is weakest in your area. 802.11bgn routers are intelligent. If they recognize a signal from another router on the same channel, they can coordinate to share that channel as necessary. They CAN’T do this if they’re on even slightly different channels, which results in the router shouting louder to be heard, instead of politely waiting its turn.

TLDR; don’t set your router channel to “Auto”. Set it to channel 1, 6, or 11, whichever is weakest in your area.