New setup, download software, set up a Pi in my shed with a FA antenna. Instant joy. I claim the unit and the stats start to come in. A day goes by and suddenly no stats and I can no longer connect to the unit. I hook up a monitor and see it states there is no wifi. I check configuration and everything is how I left it. I powered it down, pulled SD card, check txt file and both ethernet and wifi are turned on. Put card back in, plug the unit to a wired ethernet cable and powered up. Connection established and all seems well. I shut it down and take it back out to the shed. Connect antenna and power and the wifi is working again. Another day goes by and now the unit isn’t connected.
I have read about wifi issues. Power save is off so I don’t think it is shutting off the wifi. What can I do to alleviate this issue?
What does syslog say after you have wifi problems?
If you can hook up a screen to the Pi there is a summary screen on the first console that gives you some basic info about the network status too, which may be useful.
On my first attempt at this I was using an older Pi with an $11 wifi dongle and had the exact same experience. When I switched to the Pi 3 with built in Wifi that problem went away.
I power cycled and it still showed the same thing. I then connected to an ethernet cable and it started working. I shut it down and then restarted without the cable, no wifi detected.
The network info is the same for both, what should be my next step?
So I pulled the unit inside, and hooked up an ethernet cable. I SSH’d into to check the logs. When I tried to pull system logs it states permission denied. I was able to use this
$ sudo tail -f /var/log/* –
to get some logs to display, but parts of it are just random characters that I can’t read.
Everyone has a different approach to solve a problem.
My approach is different from most.
When I cannot easily debug, I format microSD card, download and write latest Piaware image (or Raspbian Jessie image), and everything is ok. No headaches, no frustrations, and no waste of time.
I know most will disagree, rather hate this idea.
Well this is MY approach, and everyone is free to chose his approach.
The syslog is the best place to check for problems.
If you run “cat /var/log/syslog | grep wlan0” it should display wlan0 stuff only.
It is also a good idea to check the piaware configuration files has the correct wifi connection settings.
Edit the wireless ssid and password in the piaware-config.txt file if not.
“nano /boot/piaware-config.txt”
And to see if your wifi can see the access point you want to connect too.
“sudo iwlist wlan0 scan”
The quality score is how many “bars” you are getting to that access point.
If you don’t see your access point in the scan you probably aren’t close enough.
If you have a low quality score you need to get closer or use something with better wifi range.
I let it run on the ethernet cable overnight and this morning it was connecting on both lan and wan. I unplugged it and it has been connecting to wifi for the last 8 hours or so.
