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How bout dat RSSI

Posted: Thu May 03, 2018 1:05 am
by fly135
Just curious how people have experienced connectivity problems and associated RSSI readings.

I'm been wanting to diagnose error conditions under congested wifi and found that moving the router far enough away and reducing signal strength can generate lots of delayed transmissions and slow or fails data transfers. Good enough to check my error returns and make decisions about timeouts.

At the current location I am reading -85 on the RSSI for that AP and identical posts to the cloud of small data varies between 1 - 20 sec to complete. OTA updates fail from 50K to 1.2M before giving up the ghost. Uploads of sound files don't complete. MQTT disconnects and reconnects. Before I move my AP I was reading -56 and everything was snappy. Plan to move the AP around and see where the reliability starts to fail.

Be cool if other people checked their RSSI and related performance experience. This is all you need to do....

Code: Select all

wifi_ap_record_t wifidata;
if (esp_wifi_sta_get_ap_info(&wifidata)==0)
  printf("rssi:%d\r\n", wifidata.rssi);

Re: How bout dat RSSI

Posted: Thu May 03, 2018 3:53 pm
by fly135
Moved my wifi router to another room. With an RSSI of -75 I'm getting good data transfers.

John A

Re: How bout dat RSSI

Posted: Thu May 03, 2018 6:00 pm
by Pibbotley
I buy second hand routers for peanuts and configure them as bridges to the dedicated router. My ESP32s then connect to whichever has the strongest signal.

Re: How bout dat RSSI

Posted: Fri May 04, 2018 8:54 am
by woofy!
For my oil tank monitor I see an RSSI of -75 to -85 and a transfer time of 1.5 to 2 seconds. Transfer time is from wake up through sensor data collection, sending the data to my MQTT server and back to deep sleep. This is in a fairly clean WIFI environment.
There's a screen shot in my post here:
viewtopic.php?f=2&t=5018&p=23295#p23283

Re: How bout dat RSSI

Posted: Fri May 04, 2018 4:13 pm
by fly135
I'm in a clean wifi environment and can xfer small amounts at ~-85. But larger amounts of audio or OTA tend to fail. I can upload my audio files and do OTA around ~-80. But in the office where wifi is congested OTA updates freq fail at -76.

@pibbotley, I'm actually moving the wifi router further away to simulate poor reception conditions and the associated errors.

John A