Hi
I am looking for a project with the goal of monitoring WiFi signal with say a test loop of minimal data. In the event that the test fails x number of times, then it would activate a power relay to momentarily stop an AC input. The idea is that should a WiFi access point lock up for whatever reason it’s power supply could be reset, thus rebooting to hopefully correct the faults that it’s own diagnostics fail to detect.
This would save the need to return home physically to reset a device that has frozen, just so that other wireless devices are not Offline too. If it could also log each reset it could then be useful to prove reliability of such a device, and when to replace.
Has anyone seen anything similar to this? I’m definitely not not gifted to just put this together, but guess it could also be used as a WiFi real-time test device, especially if the test packets used were size adjusted to run “capacity tests” .
obviously the simple way is to log in remotely and reset, however if it does not know it’s down, then it’s much harder to discover it’s down when you are not on-site or just doing other things. And if it’s also the main modem locked up, this offers the chance of automated recovery. It might also work as a wired network test, handy to IT managers for restarting devices like printers, ip phones, etc with network failures without asking users.
Thanks
Hi,
As Bradyen suggested using an ESP module is nice idea. Since the Module has Wi-Fi feature and GPIO pins it should possible for you to even add a LCD display for UI and an SD card to log the result each time it restarts the router. This way we can identity how many times the router was restarted.
But, I think modern Routers have this feature inbuilt I am not sure though.
Bradyen
PermalinkHi BrikPilot, Welcome to CircuitDigest Forums...
Yup, with the increasing number of IoT devices in home/office it has become obvious that we need a trust worthy modem/router. Perhaps I have heard many people suggesting an idea similar to yours. Never Implemented one though, but would surely try one when I get a chance.
However there are few insights that I could share. First thing first, like always what ever idea that comes to your mind, just google it and you will find that someone somewhere has already made. In this case there is a company called ResetPlug (ans many others) which sells the exact product that you are looking for. Logging feature is not available though. But this should not stop us from building our own.
When your router/modem fails most times we should be able to kick it back into operation by merely turning it off and on again. But in order to automate this we need to look into the reason of failure, which could either be with the ISP itself or with the power fluctuation in our home/office. Routers/modem are very sensitive electronics device and even small level of fluctuation in our mains voltage could stop it from working normally. So a full proof device should also check if the AC mains voltage is in proper shape.
That bring said, now lets start thinking of making our own device. I would suggest the NodeMCU family for this JOB either the ESP8266 or ESP12 or ESP32 everything should work for our project. To check if the internet is active we need to to check two main things one is Bandwidth (a.k.a speed) and the other is Latency. The browsing experience will be good only if we have high bandwidth and low latency.
You can program these ESP modules using Arduino IDE, program it in a way to connect to your router though WiFi and at specific intervals say 5 mins we can ask it to try loading a webpage like twitter or Google or even both and check the bandwidth and latency of our connection. If we are experiencing a problem we can turn off the router by simply toggling a GPIO pin of the ESP module. This GPIO pin should be connected to a Relay with controls the AC main line of the Router. It should be fairly easy.
Hope this helps, let me know if you have other ideas
John
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Joined August 14, 2018 44Tuesday at 03:25 PM