Printer Farm WiFi Struggle
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I run a smallish printer farm of 7 printers each running 20hours a day. They all are controlled via wifi. The wifi works mostly as I would expect but the 80ish% connection reliability with 7 printers this is becoming a significant headache.
On an average day I am resetting the router 1-2times, each printer 3-4times. This amounts to enough of an problem that I do not think it is possible to scale the farm much further with this networking method.
My question/cry for help to the group is: what could I do to improve wifi connection stability? The "problem state" I tend to find is the printer connection to router fails but ONLY SOMETIMES DOES IT INITIATE AUTO-RECONNECT. Often it just sits with a broken connection until i physically run a SETNETWORK (M552 and M587) wifi reset macro on the Paneldue.
WiFi signal strength ranges from -65dBm to -50dBm.
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@bubblevisor said in Printer Farm WiFi Struggle:
I run a smallish printer farm of 7 printers each running 20hours a day. They all are controlled via wifi. The wifi works mostly as I would expect but the 80ish% connection reliability with 7 printers this is becoming a significant headache.
On an average day I am resetting the router 1-2times, each printer 3-4times. This amounts to enough of an problem that I do not think it is possible to scale the farm much further with this networking method.
My question/cry for help to the group is: what could I do to improve wifi connection stability? The "problem state" I tend to find is the printer connection to router fails but ONLY SOMETIMES DOES IT INITIATE AUTO-RECONNECT. Often it just sits with a broken connection until i physically run a SETNETWORK (M552 and M587) wifi reset macro on the Paneldue.
WiFi signal strength ranges from -65dBm to -50dBm.
What Duet are you using?
The lack of a meaningful antenna on the Duet WiFi boards I have required installing an WiFi Access Point right in the room where they are.
This despite the fact that another WiFi Access point was only two rooms away.
Once I installed that AP the connections have been totally reliable.
For what it's worth that has been my experience.
Frederick
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@fcwilt I have duet 2 wifi and Duet 3 mini 5+. Most have external antennas. All have the same problem.
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@bubblevisor said in Printer Farm WiFi Struggle:
@fcwilt I have duet 2 wifi and Duet 3 mini 5+. Most have external antennas. All have the same problem.
My signals are -51, -57, -48.
Do you have a WiFi "analyzer" on your phone by chance?
In America there are only three WiFi channels that do not overlap 1, 6 and 11.
When two nearby APs are using the same channel that is co-channel interference.
When two nearby APs are using the different channels but they overlap that is adjacent-channel interference.
And while it may seem odd adjacent-channel interference is the worst of the two.
You want to use channels 1, 6 and 11. If you have more than three APs re-use the channels for APs that are the farthest apart.
So use your phones WiFi analyzer (that assumes you have one installed) and see what your WiFi environment is like.
Frederick
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@bubblevisor said in Printer Farm WiFi Struggle:
Often it just sits with a broken connection until i physically run a SETNETWORK (M552 and M587) wifi reset macro on the Paneldue.
I wonder if there is something in the object model that could be checked in daemon.g and if the connection is lost, run the setnetwork macro again to give it a kick. I know it's just a bandaid, but in a noisy wifi environment that may be as good as it gets. The signal strength you're reporting is good, so it definitely seems like interference.
What kind of router/access point is it by the way?
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in addition to washer already was said: what wifi router do you use?
it may be beneficial to invest here to get better performance and stability.
depending on where you live recommendations for better kit could be made
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I run Ubiquity gear and while I no longer experience connection problems with Duet wifi controllers, I end up having to reload the cameras that watch my prints every few minutes. The cameras are Raspberry pi zero w's running raspberry cameras on MotionEye. I have tried all manner of things without success.
I used to have intermittent connectivity on a Duet2 wifi but at one point that issue just went away <shrug>
I have an access point right in the printer room and still have to constantly reload the camera streams. -
There does seem to be an argument for a wired network here. The interference between each receiver and transmitter could be affecting the signal strength.
I appreciate that's not what you want to hear, as this could involve changing all your boards.
Could you use a couple of WiFi extenders and rename the extended WiFi signal, and connect one or two printers to each one? I use a TP-Link powerline adapter and WiFi extender in my shed as the router is located in the house (the shed is on the same mains supply), to supply my hard-wired laptop and WiFi dehumidifier, and I can split the WiFi and rename it, so the principle would be the same. You may also think about a mesh WiFi system which (I understand) has nodes you can manage, but I'm not too familiar with them.
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@bubblevisor some suggestions:
- Use a smartphone wifi scanner app to see if any other wifi networks are in range and to see which channels are free.
- Try setting your router to a different WiFi channel. It has been found that some channels work better than others on Duets.
- Try a different router/access point, especially if the one you are using is old.
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Thanks for all the great advice. I will put it into action and report back.
As an aside is there a way to have boards setup so there is both options of wifi AND ethernet?
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@bubblevisor I think probably the only options for doing this would be to either run th board in SBC mode using a rPi that supports both WiFi and wired networking, or have a board that supports wired networking and get some sort of WiFi to ethernet adaptor, but with that I'm not sure that you would be able to use both at the same time...
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This post is deleted! -
Just to report back regarding my attempts to solve my wifi woes. I have done 2 things to help improve stability:
- Using a wifi analyser to check traffic and then moving the wifi channel to a less congested frequency/channel. - This helped a bit but not much.
- Forcing my laptop to use the same 2.4GHz band as the printers. - This helped a lot. The laptop tends to have a preference by default for a 5GHz band. I suspect most computers will do this. This solved the frequent problem I had when the laptop could not connect to the printers even though the printers had a sound network connection themselves. Changing to the same band as the printers helped no end.
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@bubblevisor thanks for the tip!
