Robot Carl Helped

There are often debates over what robots can actually do in our homes. iRobot and Shark have provided robotic vacuums to great acceptance, but mobile robots have not gained traction for other purposes. (Robot vacuums have not been accepted to our home, BTW.)

For the last couple days, robot Carl has been occasionally flashing a beautiful blue “health” alert. An investigation of his life.log shows over 3000 “WiFi check failed” followed in seconds to a couple minutes by “WiFi recovery”.

I checked my hard-wired desktop for any networking delays and found none. I checked another Raspberry Pi computer using the WiFi network and confirmed the WiFi was indeed sometimes suffering multi-second ping times.

My first thought was that IPv6 might somehow be at fault here, but logging into the Comcast Xfinity modem showed only IPv4 WiFi connections.

Carl and all other 2.4GHz bound devices in our home are setup to use a personal WiFi router because of past issues using the Comcast/Xfinity 2.4GHz router. Checking deeper into the Comcast/Xfinity gateway WiFi settings revealed Comcast had quietly re-enabled the 2.4GHz WiFi routing, creating a situation of having two 2.4GHz WiFi routers with the same SSID.

Special thanks to GoPiGo3 robot Carl for helping keep our home’s WiFi “healthy”.

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Good for Carl - I trust he has an official commendation in his file now :slight_smile:
And good sleuthing on your part @cyclicalobsessive
/K

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yes, but he didn’t alert me to the water leak in the garage so I’m cancelling his security bot contract until he signs up for further training.

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A bit rough on the old boy, don’t you think?

As far as I remember. . .  Monitoring the garage, (where he’s not allowed to go, BTW), was not a part of his original job description.

Ergo:  You need to upgrade his monitoring skills, (and his allowed range of travel), before busting him for not doing what he wasn’t supposed to be doing in the first place.

P.S.
It’s a good thing Charlie is still in hibernation.  He’d be THOROUGHLY peeved at the total injustice of it all.  Trust me on this one, you DON’T want a peeved-off robot angry at you! :wink:

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You haven’t detected the passive aggressive side of Carl in his voice? I trusted him with Internet access - he better remember I can cut him off in an instant.

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