J-O-E! J-O-E!
Joe kicked some serious ass and made the rocket talk 802.11a Ad-hoc mode on CH 36 today. Yay Joe! The rocket now boots automatically in this mode, although there's some possibility we still have to manually ifdown wlan0; ifup wlan0 if it comes up on the wrong frequency. In fact, it works so amazingly well that, well, it just works now.
OMFG! OMFG!
OK, so, you know how WiFi hasn't been working very well for, say, ever? And you know how it was kind of flaky? At the end of the night, we found out that FC > USB Wifi > COTS antenna to COTS antenna > USB Wifi > laptop works great, from the PSBA room all the way down the hallway about ~ 150 ft away. But when we put in the power amps, it all went to hell. We found a broken RG-316 cable, and thought that we might have PA issues. Well, we did.
After some more investigation, we found out that we cabled the RF into the power amplifiers BACKWARDS.
Now going FC > USB Wifi > PA > COTS antenna to COTS antenna > PA > USB Wifi > laptop works great (all the way to the end of the hallway). We hope this concludes the stupidity of our current WiFi adventure, and now we can move on to actual comms testing.
Left to do
- Do we really need the caps on the rocket WiFi SPS? What about on the TrackMaster?
- Do we need caps on the rocket ATV SPS?
- Fix the rocket WiFi AP orientation and recable as necessary
- Fix PA bootup turn by adding pull-up resistor back on FC board?
- TrackMaster 2000 needs 12V SPS on-board to regulate battery voltage coming in for the WiFi PA.
- Re-cabling the TrackMaster 2000 is a good idea; plus, some kind of temporary portable battery (LiPo? or a car with inverter?)