Last year I picked up a handibot and I've made a few things here and there with it, but didn't have a lot of time to really log a good solid project. This week I jumped into it, built a jig for sliding in material and was all set to go.
Then handibot started falling off the network. This is an 'adventure edition' device, and while the wifi was always a little weak, it sputtered out and never came back. Now what's interesting about this are a few things:
1. The wifi access point is a Linksys Velop, maybe 15' away from handibot.
2. My Surface tablet and phone both have 100% signal when placed on top of handibot.
3. My neighbor across the street gets 100% signal on my wifi from his house.
This all led me to believe that it was a handibot issue, so I turned it on-and-off a few times. It came back once, but died halfway through a cut, and then never came back.
Since then I've been on a mission to make this thing work again. But it's that kind of mission where there's a thing you ACTUALLY want to be doing (making stuff with your handibot) and instead you are doing this stupid thing (figuring out why it no longer works when nothing changed).
I'm a good tech guy, so I did the standard far-above-and-beyond troubleshooting.
1. Spinning the handibot device to face the other way in case there was interference.
2. Getting the wifi even closer even though signal strength was already good enough to roast a chicken.
3. Attempting a full reset
4. Finally this morning, pulling the Edison board and doing the full firmware reload.
As a side note, the diagrams for that process do not match my device, the process did not work for my device, and the only way I could get it to work was to plug the Edison components back in, disconnect the ribbon, reconnect my USB from my laptop and restart Handibot nearly a dozen times before it hooked and uploaded the firmware.
All of this resulted in 100% no change. My handibot was not on my network, and it was not putting up an AP to connect to.
So I did what you would normally do, I read a bunch of forum posts, waded through the mess of links to google drive files, out-of-date diagrams, inconsistent naming, and then ignored it all and ran an ethernet cable and plugged it into the port which is in no way referenced as existing in any of these documents.
My handibot immediately came back online. Now at version 1.42, I decided I should upgrade to 1.6 to make sure this wasn't just an old software problem. But luckily for me, I'm not done yet because:
1. The handibot can still not manage to attach to a wifi network that is so strong that I have to leave my city block to lose connection.
2. The perfectly good ethernet connection apparently doesn't count as an external access, and the device cannot update itself.
Did I mention at some point I was trying to do some CNC stuff, before I became a full-time network engineer?
So now I can at least cut some stuff with the ethernet connection, but it's very clear that stuff is still busted. There's no AP broadcast, there's no attempt to join the network according to my access point or my dhcp server, and generall the whole thing is stuck.
I'm going to hurry up and cut some things before the whole machine decides to surrender on me again, but if anyone has some thoughts on how I can turn this experiment back into a useful tool, I'd be open to any of them.