I've had similar reports regarding poor
wifi connectivity, and this seems to affect some
modules more than others (or may be channel/frequency
dependant?). One
user has just 1-2 bars AP wifi signal with the module
placed ~ 50 cm away from the phone.
I also still get reports of spurious strange crashes,
that mostly seem to be related to situations with poor
wifi signal. Some crash backtraces just are
complete blank / null, and there is no crash report on
the USB output for these before reboot.
Yesterday, Frank tried to perform some wifi scans. The
first scan went fine, the second never returned, he
had to power off the module. After reboot, all
successive scans worked.
Two users reported they occasionally cannot auth to
the OVMS AP with the correct password, and they can
then reconnect just by retrying for some minutes or by
connecting & disconnecting another client to the
AP.
I already had a look at the wifi tx power
configuration, it's at 100% by default.
This all feels like a) we need to change something
about the antenna, and b) there are quite some bugs in
the wifi blob.
Looking at
https://github.com/espressif/esp32-wifi-lib/commits/master
it seems there have been numerous wifi blob fixes
lately. Last time I checked I still was
out of memory with the current esp-idf, I'll check
again.
Regards,
Michael
Am 06.07.2018 um 01:48 schrieb Stephen Casner:
I find the wifi
performance of OVMS v3 to be poor, and I'm wondering
how it might be improved. I have a mix of thoughts
here.
For both my own unit and that of Timothy Rodgers,
wifi reception in
our garages was unusable. You can blame that on too
much distance
from the access point, but my iPhone and MacBook
both access the wifi
just fine from my garage. The wifi antenna in the
OVMS is probably
smaller and its location within the metal framework
around the car's
firewall may impede radio transmission. Perhaps it
would be feasible
to switch to an ESP32-WROVER-I with an external
antenna to improve
performance, but that would be a big deal. If there
is a transmit
power adjustment, perhaps that could be increased?
When Timothy parks his car next to his house, which
is about 50 feet
closer than the garage, then the wifi reception was
good enough for
the update to 3.1.008 to succeed. But when he tries
to connect with
the browser, page updates often time out, so it is
close to unusable.
Perhaps we could improve usability by increasing the
timeout in our
javascript to allow more time for TCP to retransmit?
For my own unit, I switched from AP+client to just
client mode and at
first it seemed that had improved the client
performance. But still
the next day I had no access from the iPhone app.
When I connected to
the console to find out why I saw that server v2 was
repeatedly trying
to connect and failing. I'm presuming that the
cause was poor wifi
connectivity since I was also not able to reach the
web server on the
client address, although I have not proven that.
But since the client
wifi was associated with the home AP and had an
address, the OVMS
network routing preferred the wifi and did not try
to use the modem.
For now I have resorted to turning off wifi. I
suggest that the
network routing algorithm be enhanced to back off to
use the modem if
some number of attempts to connect to the server
over wifi have
failed. The iPhone will do this for itself (there
is a setting to
enable this called Wi-Fi Assist).
The behavior of repeated connection attempts and
failures by server v2
seems to induce a more serious failure after a
while, perhaps due to
some resource starvation. At that point there is a
failure message
"mg_connect(api.openvehicles.com:6867)
failed: cannot parse address"
every time server v2 tries to connect. I expect
that is a bug that
could be fixed.
Lastly, since we may encounter situations where
network communication
is not working, we should facilitate access to the
console. When I
was trying to help Timothy change a location radius
setting remotely
by phone and the web browser was timing out, I
suggested that he find
a micro-USB cable so he could connect to the
console. But then I
realized he would not have any application on his
laptop that would
allow him to connect to the console. Developers use
"make monitor" in
the software development cycle, but users won't have
that tool. I
have my own program on the MacBook that I use as an
alternative when I
don't want to induce a reset when I connect. But is
there a simple
program for Windows suitable for non-developer users
that can connect
to the OVMS console?
-- Steve
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Michael Balzer * Helkenberger Weg 9 * D-58256
Ennepetal
Fon 02333 / 833 5735 * Handy 0176 / 206 989 26
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