GIGA R1 WiFi Failures

Official Hardware Mega GIGA R1 WiFi
1

We are running a number of Giga R1 and we've now seen what seems to be WiFi failures on two devices.

If we strip the boards back of all other hardware and just load the simple scan networks script, the boards have no errors loading but the scan finds almost no networks. It can just about find the strongest local network but is intermittent. On a fresh Giga, it'll list 40+ local SSID's. It's like you might have a poor or weak antenna.

We've done the usual reflash of Wifi and Bootloader, changed antennas, etc, etc but it makes no difference. Again - this has happened on two boards now in exactly the same way.

Has anyone else experienced this or has any advice on understanding why or what is happening ?

2

Hi everyone,
Hope I'm in the right topic for my issue. Wifi connection (performed in setup) is working perfectly until I create a wifi microcut, i try to reconnect periodically saying every 2 or 3 sec in calling this function to not to have a too long blocking behaviour:

void WiFiReconnect(){
   Serial.println(WifiStatus(WiFi.status()));
   
   while(WiFi.status() != WL_CONNECTED) {
    Serial.print("Attempting to connect to SSID: ");
    Serial.println(network.ssid);
    status = WiFi.begin(network.ssid, network.pass); 
    delay(500);
  }

it seems that WiFi.begin function blocks and takes several seconds sometimes more than 20 sec (without exit while loop)It trigger the watchdog even if I periodically kick it in the reconnect function
How WiFi.begin really works is there a way to have a non blocking behaviour.
in wl_definitions.h can we play with WL_MAX_ATTEMPT_CONNECTION by default it is set to 10 ?
Any other tips ?
thanks for your help

3

After some investigations (and many hours... :shushing_face:) I found a solution in implemting the reconnect functions in threads (maybe this is not the cleanest, but it works even with in a larger sketch). I share my test sketch maybe it can help another Arduino explorer :sunglasses:
Wifi_mqtt_non_blocking.ino (5.3 KB)

4

I also have had two boards with wifi that stopped working. No program changes or hardware changes. Replace with new board and works fine. Seems like the wifi chips are failing.

5

Hi @wigglesworth. Did you connect the antenna that comes with the GIGA R1 WiFi board?

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6

Of course pretty sure it wouldnt work very well without it. And wouldnt explain why it works fine for a couple weeks and without touching anything just stops working.

7

@wigglesworth Yes. And we remembered to connect the power as well...

The point is that the boards were working very well and then we had (and @ptillisch seems to have had) wifi 'fail' without any other changes. We are confident that it wasn't a heat/cooling related issue.

As a note, we did contact Arduino support and the response was that it can happen. When we asked if it could happen again, the response was that it could.

Good luck fellow developers... !

8

Nope. I haven't had any problems at all with Wi-Fi communication using my GIGA R1 WiFi board.

Then only thing I intended to convey in my previous reply was that not connecting the antenna is one possible cause of the symptom you reported:

From your post, it was clear that you were using the antenna, but at the time I wrote that reply I didn't have any information on which to judge whether @wigglesworth had done so. We now know that @wigglesworth did indeed connect the antenna, which disproves my hypothesis about the cause of the problem they reported, but it was worth checking at least.

9

Hello @technfc,

If you're still experiencing issues with the WiFi connectivity of your Giga R1 boards, I recommend reaching out to our support team for further assistance. You can do so by filling out the contact form available at the following link: https://www.arduino.cc/en/contact-us/

Please provide as much detail as possible about the issue you're facing, including any troubleshooting steps you've already taken. Our support team will do their best to help you resolve the problem.

Best regards.

10

I'm similar. two boards that used to connect in < 3s, now taking multiple attempts (usually 4) to connect. Of course, the antenna is connected. I'm not seeing any firmware updates for this.

11

Replying to see if anyone else has had this issue and how they solved it. I'm having the same issue where my code and hardware were working perfectly fine, and then all of a sudden I can't connect to the same network I had been able to connect to previously. I tried updating firmware and replacing the antenna but that didn't seem to work either.

12

We gave up and used another (non-Arduino) board. We couldn't take the risk.

However, for the benefit of others who might be able to solve this, we think we didn't have another failure once we used fixed IP addresses on the boards:

IPAddress gateway(x, x, x, x);
IPAddress subnet(255, 255, 255, 0);
IPAddress local_IP(x,x,x,x);
WiFi.config(local_IP.toString().c_str(), subnet.toString().c_str(), gateway.toString().c_str());

We can't be sure because we'd already started to move development away from Arduino at this point but if anyone is still struggling with this - it might help.

13

I've had a particular GIGA develop what appeared to be a hard WiFi failure. Test code was running overnight. Found the No WiFi message in the morning. Still not working after reboot then also reloaded sketch. WiFi seemed dead.

Let board sit for a couple of days.Tried it again and it's been working great for a few weeks. Seems like some uninitialized register gets into a bad state and resetting and reloading doesn't fix it. But letting the charge fade away over a day restores it.

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