Wifi link slow with new router

GeneRisi

I'm in the US. I just updated my cable box plus router to xFi (Comcast) and now the printer upload speed dropped from 730 kB/sec to about 14 KB/s . Any ideas on what to do?

Phaedrux

Ouch. Not the upgrade you were hoping for I bet.

Can you send M122 in the gcode console and copy and paste the result here so we can check your firmware versions and see what hardware you have?

dc42

@GeneRisi what WiFi signal strength does M122 report?

You could try the version 2.1beta DuetWiFiServer file from the RRF 3.5beta1 release. It uses a later version of the Expressif SDK and they may have fixed some WiFi issues in that.

GeneRisi

@dc42 The signal strength was good. My problem seems to be with channel 1 (US). That makes me wonder: How do you set up the Duet's wifi to handle the different country standards (US, Japan, Europe,...)? The different standards include different frequency ranges. I have seen with other wifi interfaces a way to tell the wifi transceiver which set of wifi channel standards should be used.

dc42

@GeneRisi so have you solved the problem by switching the router to a different WiFi channel?

Which Duet do you have?

GeneRisi

@dc42 This is what I have:

"RepRapFirmware for Duet 2 WiFi/Ethernet version 3.4.5 (2022-11-30 19:36:12) running on Duet WiFi 1.02 or later + DueX5
Board ID: 08DGM-9T6BU-FG3SJ-6JKF4-3SD6L-TUXRF"

Changing the wifi channel solved the problem. And channel 1 was completely unused by anyone in the radius that my cell phone can detect.

I wonder if anyone else has run on channel 1 ? It should be a good choice in many environments.

dc42

@GeneRisi thanks. We have seen problems using channel 1 previously. It may be that the 20th harmonic of the CPU clock frequency is being picked up by the WiFi antenna, because the antenna is quite close to other components on the PCB.

GeneRisi

@dc42 Is it a simple mod to add a separate wifi antenna to replace the PCB antenna?

jay_s_uk

@GeneRisi you can hack on an external wifi antenna to an ESP8266 https://www.hackster.io/simon-vavpotic/esp32-and-esp8266-external-antenna-f28e6b
or you can change the module to an ESP07s