RAE Access point not working

coalman321

I have been trying to set up my RAE to use with ROS 2. Following the instructions, I am trying to put RAE into the Wifi Access Point mode so that I can connect my laptop to it and command my RAE. I was able to properly configure the access point on the latest RAE 1.13 FW. Unfortunately when my laptop attempts to connect to the rae-<id> access point, the laptop will fail to join the network and the access point will disappear. looking at the Wifi service in systemd, and dmesg, there is no logs about what happened, but the AP will remain inaccessible until RAE is rebooted. I also attempted using the SSID and password of the RAE AP to join after it goes down and the laptop will fail to connect as well. Any help here would be appreciated as I would like to demo my RAE.

jakaskerl

Hi coalman321
Did you manually set up the wifi connection by first connecting to the rae using USB? Also keep in mind that by disabling the robothub agent, you will need to manually setup the wifi as described in ssh instructions.

Thanks,
Jaka

coalman321

jakaskerl Yes. I did follow the instructions by setting it up over USB first. The AP files match the configuration in the documentation and I can see / join the AP briefly. I was actually able to ssh in for about 10 seconds over wifi before the wifi AP dropped.

To be clear, I am not attempting to manually connect my RAE to an existing network but use its onboard wifi card as an access point as is configured out of the box.

jakaskerl

coalman321 I see. I'll check what can be done tomorrow at the office, since I don't currently have any device at hand.

Thanks,
Jaka

DaniloPejovic

coalman321

If I understand you correctly and you have set up wifi manually - that would mean that this file exists on your device:

/etc/systemd/network/20-wifi.network

with following content:

Match] Name=wlp1s0 [Network] DHCP=ipv4 [DHCP] UseDomains=true

If that is true - can you try removing it and rebooting the device. In that case AP should be able to be connected to as other configs would not clash with AP.

coalman321

DaniloPejovic One of my last attempts to get RAE to allow me to join was to re-flash the latest firmware. Currently the /etc/systemd/network directory is empty.

coalman321

DaniloPejovic I did make another discovery today. The issue seems to be related to how long RAE has been powered on recently. After leaving RAE off for the past two days, the AP seems functional. I do not believe this is tied to rebooting RAE as I restarted it many times during my initial testing without any luck. I even powered it down for about eight hours and was unable to establish a connection after powering back on. With the current connection however, I am noticing great latency (up to 2s) while SSH'd in over wifi. This latency is not present over USB.

DaniloPejovic

Is AP still functional in general use cases or does it drop? Did you fully disable robothub agent? It could prove useful if you are only going to use ROS.

There shouldn't be any latency on general messages, obviously latency will be bit worse than USB when sending images over the network - especially if there are multiple image streams as that is massive amount of data.

coalman321

DaniloPejovic

The AP will still drop after about an hour of being turned on. When the AP drop occurs, the robothub agent is both stopped and disabled. None of its processes show up in the output of ps -aux either.

In terms of latency, what I observed is not even ROS traffic being slow. The latency was observed over just a plain SSH connection with nothing running (no ROS docker, nor robothub agent running). I observe the latency while typing stuff into the SSH terminal or getting text back. It regularly takes anywhere from 1 to 2 seconds for the output of the program, or the characters I am typing to show up in the terminal. If I open another terminal over the USB connection while the latency is present, I am unable to notice any significant latency over the USB connection.