Solved Esp8266 with external antenna in Duet Wifi
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For those planning to buy a Duet WiFi soon, we'll shortly be listing the Duet WiFi variant with external antenna on our web shop.
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I saw it on the shop yesterday already (-;
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Damn.... clicked too soon. The external antenna would have been nice even although I've not had any problems with the internal one in 3 different room in the house....
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Gracias a todos.
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In my case, the signal improved from 71dB to 56dB with the external antenna ... and that's in addition to an additional wifi hotspot (the hotspot got me from 78 to 71dB, and has other uses so it's not a waste). It's pretty astounding
The antenna is currently in a holder taped to the enclosure of my CR-20, but all that's missing is a hole of the right size to get rid of the jury-rig.
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@oliof said in Esp8266 with external antenna in Duet Wifi:
In my case, the signal improved from 71dB to 56dB with the external antenna
Did this increase significantly the file upload speed?
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@zapta subjectively yes, but I need to check the actual throughput (I recently discovered that PrusaSlicer can upload directly to Duet, and they do not show transfer speeds as uploads to Duet happen in the background). I will grab some numbers tomorrow.
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@zapta I just tested an upload with a large GCODE file (66Megabytes).
On my old setup I would achieve between 60 and 80KiB/sec, with the new setup, I got between 5 and 8 times that speed:
Of course, the new antenna is also in a different location, so I can't guarantee it's just the external antenna. But I am fairly sure it's a contributing factor.
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@oliof said in Esp8266 with external antenna in Duet Wifi:
with the new setup, I got between 5 and 8 times that speed:
That's very significant. I get about 250KiB/s. Not sure where the bottleneck is.
I recently discovered that PrusaSlicer can upload directly to Duet
Yes, very useful though the progress report could be improved
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OK, here is the surprising result with the integrated antenna located at the point where the external antenna is (which wouldn't physically be possible if I used it with the CR-20 housing and is quite different to the original location due to wire lengths .... -- the antennas are now about 6cm apart):
I'm not making this up (-: It just shows that with WiFi, the three most important rules are the same as with real estate: location, location, location.
antenna locations:
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The built-in antenna on the Duet WiFi is very short, much shorter than the WiFi antenna in a typical smartphone. Also, if you mount the Duet horizontally, it is in the wrong orientation for most routers. So it's not surprising that the external antenna helps a lot.
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Suffice to say that in my specific case the difference between 80KiB and 546KiB on the built-in antenna is mostly distance to the nearest wall (5cm vs. 55cm). But mounting the board within a sheet metal enclosure probably wouldn't have helped, so going with an external antenna was still the right call.
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@oliof, I just made an experiment, moved the printer, router and computer close to each other but max transfer via web interface is still 250KiB max (I am using 2.4GHZ wifi if it matters).
I presume that an external antenna will not help in my case.
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@zapta, have you tried a new SD card, formatted to 32k or 64k cluster size?
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@zapta said in Esp8266 with external antenna in Duet Wifi:
(I am using 2.4GHZ wifi if it matters)
ESP8266 is limited to 2.4Ghz so 5Ghz will not be of any help.
