Anyone using Arduino official wifi shield? A lot of questions and no answers.

[rant] The end-of-rant is intentionally left out in case more rant is added later.
I've recently started using official arduino wifi shield. I have a lot of questions but only rarely find answers on the forum or on arduino product page. I dug down deep into the library but since the shield has its own firmware, all interesting things are happening there (there's code but come on how am I supposed to understand all that). Unfortunately Arduino team provides no manual on the principles of operation of the shield, just links of function calls.

One thing, like why am I not getting MAC address until I connect to a wifi router, is bothering me since I can dig all the way down to sending SPI command to wifi chip and found no answer why a connection is needed to return a MAC address. No connections, all zeros. It's frustrating to work without knowing what these functions do.

Another thing is I wonder if the wifi chip keeps the connection active and renews IP address lease regularly. I'm designing something to be operational for long periods of time, a month or so at a time so everything needs to be understood to prevent exceptions but there's no documentation for this almost $100 piece of electronics!!

http://arduino.cc/forum/index.php/topic,162481.0.html

http://arduino.cc/forum/index.php/topic,162395.0.html

http://arduino.cc/forum/index.php/topic,161634.0.html

Sorry liudr, if I knew anything about the shield or even owned one, we would troubleshoot it together..

codlink:
Sorry liudr, if I knew anything about the shield or even owned one, we would troubleshoot it together..

Hey codlink,
Thanks for the moral support. I will either become too frustrated and try other stuff or become a subject matter expert somehow.

I will take a dab at the wifi firmware tonight.

Now the wifi shield firmware update description is also very sketchy. I tried it but just got nothing on the FTDI header. I then tried the other wifi shield I didn't update, nothing on the FTDI header. I don't have Arduino serial adapter but I tried to guess how it's connected, it doesn't even have any marking such as 5V gnd tx, rx etc. on the wifi shield. I'm through buying Arduino brand boards.

have you discovered anything interesting about IP lease?
thanks in advance.

cantore:
have you discovered anything interesting about IP lease?
thanks in advance.

A tentative answer is yes. I have used the unit for extended time and the IP address stays the same.

may be one solution is to periodically call the wifi.begin but I don't thing this is the best way to solve the lease problem

cantore:
may be one solution is to periodically call the wifi.begin but I don't thing this is the best way to solve the lease problem

If there is no wifi.end() then I am hesitant to call begin too many times. But in my own project I have done it, only when I lose the connection. Arduino has a long list of problems, not having proper end() to pair with begin() is just one of them, an annoying one too. I don't know if the DUE sound library now has proper end() or not. At least when I was helping some with it on the forum, the library only worked once, playing one sound, and then there was no way to reinitialize and play another.