Losing Packets; apps don’t work

[kcbrier]

I just bought an arduino open sprinkler at the Maker Faire. Raced home and rewired my existing system to the OpenSprinkler, installed and configured the wireless router and it worked. For about 5 minutes. Then I started losing packets and cannot start either the mobile app (love that, by the way) or the native app from the IP address.
If it was just me, I’d say it was something I did, but my husband did the setup and is a super geek who has done networking and embedded applications for over 30 years. He pings the router and gets 100%; pings the OpenSprinkler controller and gets 50%.
Any suggestions? We tried rebooting, we tried changing out the cables; we tried re-doing all the wiring.
It’s been a frustrating afternoon and evening and hate for it to end with reinstalling my old orbit controller, but I live in the high desert of Nevada and without a sprinkler all my grass and plants will die very, very quickly.
Karen

[Samer]

In my experience, the controller doesn’t handle a flood of requests well. In fact, more than one device is pretty much to many.

After a reboot, try to limit interaction (sounds odd but isn’t a problem unless playing/testing).

Ray knows about the issue and no real solution has presented itself yet.

If that doesn’t help I am not sure. You said wired so probably not but make sure you aren’t using wireless (for now).

[kcbrier]

Thanks, Salbahra, I’ll try that.
I am using wireless and of course, I was madly pressing manual options on an off to see them go on and off without walking half a mile back to the controller!
So to test it, I should turn them all off, reboot, then turn on one and wait to see what happens?
Karen

[kcbrier]

Never mind! My husband just pointed out that if it isn’t responding to a PING then that’s not going to solve anything. (I’m still going to try, but just posting in case someone thinks of something else while I’m doing that!)

The good news? It is RAINING. It never rains, but today it is raining quite steadily so I’m not panicked at all!

[fbrier]

This is Fred, Karen’s husband. So yeah, ping is only returning 25% to 75% of the packets (sets of 4 pings). Never 100%. So lots of packet loss. And as Karen said, ping has no packet loss against the router’s IP. A browser on the laptop or tablet can’t even load the main page off the OpenSprinkler device. When using the Android mobile app, we keep getting the message “Check device password and try again.” We disabled requiring the password, but are still getting the same message the majority of the time. Could this just be a side effect of packet loss? Is it possible we just got a bad unit? On a positive note, while extremely intermittent, she has been able to turn sprinklers on and off using the mobile app. Thank you for any help.

[Ray]

Hi, sorry to hear that you are having trouble with OpenSprinkler. I just came back from Maker Faire yesterday and have started responding to forum questions.

if I understand it correctly, you have OpenSprinkler connected to a WiFi adapter, which further talks to the router, is this correct? If so, which WiFi adapter are you using? The WiFi signal quality varies, depending on the distance and barriers between the adapter and router. So a non 100% ping rate is not uncommon.

Can you try to connect OpenSprinkler to the router directly via an Ethernet cable and do ping test again? Also, make sure you are not simultaneously access the controller from multiple devices, because the Arduino-based OpenSprinkler isn’t very capable at handling multiple requests at the same time. Just use one browser, or one app to access it at a time.

Which mobile device do you have? iOS? Android? Widows, or someting else? If you are having trouble with the mobile app, you can access the controller directly by opening a browser and type in the IP address of the controller.

Let me know if any of the above suggestions help.

[fbrier]

Hi Ray,

It appears the TP-Link TL-WR710N router was indeed the culprit. The laptop and tablet were connecting perfectly to the wireless, but the LAN port on the router appears to be bad, although maybe I ran into 2-3 bad cables. I had a Buffalo WZR-300HP that I had burned with DD-WRT and set it up as a client bridge to the rest of the network. We can now ping the OpenSprinkler with no packet loss. Our logistical issue is that the sprinkler station Karen replaced was in the detached garage. I don’t have an Ethernet cable that long and have not run conduit to it yet. Once she had it wired up, she was disinclined to move it. The OpenSprinkler unit did not want to communicate using the IP it had previously received from the TP-Link when I connected it directly to the laptop. I was about to try and set a static IP on the OpenSprinkler (not sure how to do that), when I remembered the Buffalo.

We have run into a couple of other issues (NTP), but I will try to resolve them. For some reason, the NTP Sync feature is not finding a server. Combined with the intermittent packets, it would just hang, so we were disabling it. When Karen was disabling it, somehow the HTTP port got set to 0. Using the B3 options button, we could not reset the port back to 80, so we reset the firmware. That fixed the HTTP port, but reset the NTP Sync to enabled. Fortunately, with proper network traffic, there is a delay, but the device is not frozen. Karen likes the mobile app, but as a business analyst, she has already identified some enhancements. Perhaps I can take a SWAG at them and post the patches. Thank you again.

Fred

[Samer]

Glad to hear things are working! If you have any suggestions regarding the mobile app please free to discuss them. Also, as you mentioned, patches or pull requests would be great as well.

Thanks!

[Ray]

Hi Fred,

Thanks for posting the updates. I am glad that it’s in a more working state than before, although I gathered there are still some issues. Here are some misc. suggestions:

1. I’ve seen some users use the Ethernet over powerline adapters instead of WiFi adapters:
http://www.amazon.com/TP-LINK-TL-PA2010KIT-Powerline-Adapter-Starter/dp/B00AWRUIY4/
This basically uses the powerline in your house to create a wired network, and seems to work better when WiFi is not reliable (or over many barriers in the house)

2. You can set a static IP on the controller (or alternatively leave the controller to use DHCP, but bind a fixed IP to the controller’s MAC on your router). Either way, you can get a fixed IP address. Setting a static IP also makes it faster to re-establish connection when network is temporarily disconnected. The online user manual at http://www.opensprinkler.com explains how to set static IP on the controller.

3. The HTTP port is only settable through the web interface (it’s not settable on the controller because its value can go up to 32768 and it would be quite tedious to use buttons to set it).

[Author]

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