Sorry I couldn't find a suitable forum to post this question in. I tried /r/raspberry_pi on reddit but they auto-deleted my post.
I left my home on an extended trip and wanted to use a raspberry pi with camera to monitor my water meter in my house by capturing automated still photos and running OCR on them. This way if something busts a leak in my house I can detect it from the water meter and send my neighbor to shut off water mains, assess the damage, etc.
So I was in a bit of a rush setting this up, I thought I had done it right. I didn't have time to do my usual raspbian OS setup (minimal without GUI) and went with the GUI this time and I set it up from the desktop on the pi by simply connecting to my wifi SSID in the network menu. I set the hostname of the pi to something unique so it would be possible to identify later so I can whip up the scripts. The router is 3 feet away from this Pi 3 model B. And I just left it running. It was working for the better part of the day. And then I left. But now, I am looking at the connected devices from my router and it is not appearing. I have set up a simple cronjob from my workstation,
I have many other pi's that i've never experienced this sort of dropping off the network.
My plan now is I can bring my neighbor in to my basement to power cycle the pi by un/replugging it, that certainly would be all that I could reasonably request of him... and while I do expect this to connect back to wifi and allow me to set it up properly, I'm not really confident anymore that I can make it work reliably. Does anyone have any theories? Would setting up a wpa_supplicant tend to improve reliability? I actually looked this up at the time and supposedly connecting to a network in the settings should be as reliable as setting a wpa_supplicant. And even if it got powered off and back on and is waiting at login screen, the wifi should have auto-connected. As for power, I am pretty sure I did use a beefy 5v wall wart with this, now I also did a test earlier with a USB voltage meter upon seeing the low voltage warning during my camera testing when I had it powered by a PC USB port, and never saw it dip below 4.9V or consume over 5W when I checked, so I don't think i should expect a power problem here. I'd say the probability is higher that the SD card I happened to use is a dud.
Update: So the rubber ducky effect is real. Took until I took a shower the next day to realize I should actually just have him grab an ethernet cable and plug it into the pi and the router which is right there and that's going to eliminate the wifi problem for me, probably doesn't need the power cycle.
I left my home on an extended trip and wanted to use a raspberry pi with camera to monitor my water meter in my house by capturing automated still photos and running OCR on them. This way if something busts a leak in my house I can detect it from the water meter and send my neighbor to shut off water mains, assess the damage, etc.
So I was in a bit of a rush setting this up, I thought I had done it right. I didn't have time to do my usual raspbian OS setup (minimal without GUI) and went with the GUI this time and I set it up from the desktop on the pi by simply connecting to my wifi SSID in the network menu. I set the hostname of the pi to something unique so it would be possible to identify later so I can whip up the scripts. The router is 3 feet away from this Pi 3 model B. And I just left it running. It was working for the better part of the day. And then I left. But now, I am looking at the connected devices from my router and it is not appearing. I have set up a simple cronjob from my workstation,
*/5 * * * * ping -c4 raspberrypi-3-cam.local && echo "raspberrypi-3-cam is up" | emailme.py, but... I don't expect it to magically reappear on its own.I have many other pi's that i've never experienced this sort of dropping off the network.
My plan now is I can bring my neighbor in to my basement to power cycle the pi by un/replugging it, that certainly would be all that I could reasonably request of him... and while I do expect this to connect back to wifi and allow me to set it up properly, I'm not really confident anymore that I can make it work reliably. Does anyone have any theories? Would setting up a wpa_supplicant tend to improve reliability? I actually looked this up at the time and supposedly connecting to a network in the settings should be as reliable as setting a wpa_supplicant. And even if it got powered off and back on and is waiting at login screen, the wifi should have auto-connected. As for power, I am pretty sure I did use a beefy 5v wall wart with this, now I also did a test earlier with a USB voltage meter upon seeing the low voltage warning during my camera testing when I had it powered by a PC USB port, and never saw it dip below 4.9V or consume over 5W when I checked, so I don't think i should expect a power problem here. I'd say the probability is higher that the SD card I happened to use is a dud.
Update: So the rubber ducky effect is real. Took until I took a shower the next day to realize I should actually just have him grab an ethernet cable and plug it into the pi and the router which is right there and that's going to eliminate the wifi problem for me, probably doesn't need the power cycle.
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