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Need WiFi to use Onion once set-up?



  • Hi - once an Onion has been set-up and LAN connection over Wifi to another system is working with no issues (e.g. Omega-XXXX to a laptop) - will the system work without the original Wifi connection used to set-up?

    I am about to take the system 'on-the-road' and I will not have my home Wifi setup to take with me!

    Cheers, S



  • @SKS Once you have completed your Omega2 setup and connected to your Omega2 to home wifi, the access point (AP) you use to connect to your Omega2 is still functional. So if you no longer have access to your home wifi it doesn't disable the AP, so you can still use that AP to connect to your Omega2.



  • @crispyoz Thanks!



  • @crispyoz Hi - I've been exploring this some more since we last spoke with. different chips. It seems that if the Onion cannot connect to an AP there are latency issues. If the Onion is connected to an AP - minimal issues (I'm using video streaming over WiFi as a test)

    Any idea why this would be? Does the Onion 'search' constantly for a connection if it doesn't have one and this affects performance?



  • @SKS Like most network client devices, the Omega2 will search for an available AP when it is not connected, in my experience this is a resource intensive process.

    When you say you are streaming over wifi, but you are not connected to wifi, how are you testing this? Perhaps you can provide a little more details.



  • @crispyoz Sure. The Omega is a kind of 'hotspot' i.e. it connects to an in-range network and also another client can connect to it over wifi (e.g. laptop). If I connect a USB camera to the Omega, I can use my laptop and connect to the Omega over wifi - "Omega-XXXX". Once I have connected I can point my browser to the streaming URL and view the camera output.

    If the Omega cannot connect to a known network itself, this is where I start to see the issues. The performance of the stream as viewed on the laptop over wifi has skips and freezes.

    Let me know if this makes sense. Thanks



  • @SKS OK that makes sense. If you look in /etc/config/wireless do you have a wifi network configured in "sta" ? Try to comment that section out using # symbol on each line and then restart and see if this improves performance. I suspect your device is searching for a configured wifi network, by removing that configuration the device will no longer search.



  • You could also connect by using a serial connection. For me, the USB serial connect works over the same USB cable used for powering the the Omega 2. I was happy to find that only one USB connection was needed. It really helped me when I was working around the issue when, after my upgrade to Ω-ware: 0.3.2 b233, the device's AP was not coming up when 'country' is specified in /etc/config/wireless. The serial connect has the added benefit of displaying kernel messages when the system is booting.



  • Thanks - will give it a go


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  • replying to an old thread i know...

    @sks @crispyoz it seems that the behaviour you describe puts the omega's in our application over the edge sometimes.

    keeping the "sta" part switched on without a wifi network to "connect to" in our case apparently eats so much resources (or something else happens) that it renders our application crippled.

    we are currently troubleshooting franticly because we start getting devices back from customers, sometimes even the omega's AP SSID disappears from the air and the omega needs a reboot to "fix" it.
    the serial console keeps working in this case, so luckily there is a way to investigate further.

    i really hope someone finds a way to make this more reliable.

    For now we will be shipping our devices in 'ap' mode instead of 'apsta'

    if you're interested, i just opened a help request about this at https://community.onion.io/topic/4659/wifi-driver-seems-to-crash-when-wifi-network-unavailable.

    cheers tony

    always open to suggestions 😉


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