Problem with slow Duet WiFi
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I have two Duet WiFi board on two printers. One behaves beautifully while the other is intermittent. Both have PanelDue displays. They are situated side by side.
The symptoms are that, while one board powers up very quickly and the PanelDue jumps rapidly from 'Connecting' to 'Starting Up' to 'Idle' in under a second, the other sits in the 'Starting Up' phase for 20 or 30 seconds. This board is then intermittent on WiFi. When it gets a connection it has a 90% signal (according to the AP) but it repeatedly drops out.
Any suggestions as to where to start troubleshooting? What is the DuetWiFi doing in the 'Starting Up' phase that could be taking 20 seconds? If I know that then it might give a clue where to look.
For example, does it have to have a solid WiFi connection before it comes out of 'Starting Up'?
EDIT: I should have mentioned that this is a new issue. It's been behaving perfectly until yesterday when this slow down and WiFi connectivity problems started.
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The wifi is not started until the startup phase has completed.
One possibility for the slow startup is that the Duet is having difficulty reading the SD card. If the two printers use compatible configurations, try swapping the SD cards over and see if the fault moves with the card.
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A brand new SD card didn’t help I'm afraid. Still very slow to boot up. I've tried reverting the Web Server to 1.02 and that seems to have helped with the web connection.
I guess the next thing to try is to completely erase it and reflash everything.
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Is it just that PanelDue is slow to connect, or is the board slow to provide a USB connection too?
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Connecting to PanelDue doesn't seem to be a problem, the 'Connecting' message flashes up very briefly before stopping in 'Starting Up'. What's strange too is that the PanelDue works just fine during the 'Starting up' phase. I can touch a 'Home' button for example, and the system does it. That's why I was wondering what exactly was going on during the 'Starting up' phase?
I'm also experiencing much increased WiFi dropouts and slow WiFi on this same Duet, so I'm trying to establish if these two things are connected or just a coincidence. Once I manage to get a gcode file into the board it prints fine, no problems at that stage.
Haven't tried a USB connection. I'll do so and report back.
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The starting up phase is when the Duet is processing config.g. You could try to find out if it is a particular command in config.g that is taking too long to execute.
One thing that may confuse the issue is that if PanelDue doesn't receive a response to one of its status requests, it will delay before trying again (about 5 seconds AFAIR) to avoid building up a large queue of pending requests. So you may wish to use M117 at the end of config.g to send a message, so you can see when config.g really stops executing.
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This gets stranger. Adding in an M117 somewhere in config.g, even one with no text, fixes the problem! The 'Starting up' message comes up for a flash, less than a second, before going to 'Idle'. Comment out that M117 and it goes back to taking 30 seconds.
I'm guessing that it's always finished booting, it's just that PanelDue doesn't know about it. The addition of the M117 forces a communication with PanelDue that corrects the missed message.
Anyway, with the blank M117 in there all works fine.
