I recently installed a new Raspberry based Sensorgnome for a Motus station. I have WPA/WPA2 wifi available. I have edited the uboot file with the wifi name and password, uploaded the file, and rebooted the system. I am still not seeing that my sensorgnome is active in the network and I am not uploading any data. Is there a way to see if the wifi is actually connected? Any suggestions on a fix? The wifi signal on my phone does not show extremely strong so maybe inside the closed box I am not receiving the wifi.
Kevin,
It does sound like your Wifi signal may be too weak.
The Pi3 has only a small chip antenna for WiFi which is poorer than the plug-in antennas on Routers and those in moden phones so it does sound like your WiFi may be too weak.
Do you know how to get SSH access to the SGPi via it’s local hotspot? If so then you can run iwlist which will show all the available WiFi connections along with their signal strength. The command is:
iwlist wlan0 scanning
Check the output for the SSID of your hotspot and signal level.
When connected to a hotspot running on my phone my SGPi gives the following:
wlan0 Scan completed :
Cell 01 - Address: FE:E1:44:6C:94:86
Channel:1
Frequency:2.412 GHz (Channel 1)
Quality=66/70 Signal level=-44 dBm
Encryption key:on
ESSID:“HotspotSSID”
Bit Rates:1 Mb/s; 2 Mb/s; 5.5 Mb/s; 11 Mb/s; 6 Mb/s
9 Mb/s; 12 Mb/s; 18 Mb/s
Bit Rates:24 Mb/s; 36 Mb/s; 48 Mb/s; 54 Mb/s
This won’t fix your problem but at least confirms if signal strength is the problem.
Assuming you can’t move the SGPi receiver then your best option is probably a WiFi range extender with an Ethernet cable connected to LAN port on the SGPi. Once the WiFi extender is set up the SGPi should use the connection without any further configuration changes.
Kind regards.
EAP
What type of enclosure do you have? Metal or plastic?
Does anything change if you have the enclosure wide open?
Can you enable a hotspot on your phone and configure the rPi to connect to it for test purposes? (Maybe you can set your phone’s hotspot to the same ssid/passwd as the “regular” one, unless that’s going to mess with too many other devices.) You should be able to see on your phone whether the rPi connects, at least for me it shows a list of connected clients.
I don’t know how SGs are set-up, perhaps you can remove the sdcard from the rPi, plug it into your laptop and look at the logs in /var/log? (Dunno whether /var/log is configured to be in-memory only.)
Hi Kevin, you check if your receiver has connected by visiting sensorgnome.org/status. Within a few minutes of booting up you should see your receiver here after an initial check in. There is a bit of information about this process (and how to confirm connectivity) here: https://docs.motus.org/sensorgnome/internet
Something I find that occasionally happens is that an otherwise functioning RPi SG won’t connect to a network. Simply starting with fresh software on a formatted card usually does the trick so that would be good to try.
That’s all assuming the WiFi signal reaches your receiver sufficiently well, which as others have noticed isn’t guaranteed even if you can pick up the signal on your phone. Depending on where the nearest router is you could purchase a WiFi extender for $30-$40 or so to go the extra distance.
Is there a WiFi extender that is recommended or has been tested with SensorGnomes since there are so many out there on the market?
We had the WiFi signal boosted at a station location where our phones can connect to it now, but the SensorGnome stays still stays stuck in “Scanning” mode so I guess the raspberry pi antenna chip isn’t strong enough.
Hi Mack, there are some suggestions here: Suggestion for Long-range Wi-Fi Extenders
If there is cellular coverage what about something like this with a SIM card:
It’s autonomous and creates a Wifi signal. I haven’t tried it yet though…