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”.