Hub frequent disconnects, general wireless concerns

I’ve noticed that my hub is constantly disconnecting from the 802.11 wireless network (but seems to be maintaining the connection to the sensor unit, and is able to do bluetooth (although that’s crashed a few times as well) it’s not an issue on the network side, I’ve exhausted most of that troubleshooting process, so suspecting I may have a faulty radio module in the device (I also notice that once it disconnects from the wifi, it makes no attempt to reconnect unless I cycle the power, which seems like it would be a code design problem). In case it’s a problem with that specific access point, I’ve moved it to another area of the house on a different access point, to see if it stays up in that situation, but at this point, I’d be surprised.

What I found interesting, however, was that once it came back online, it still had retained all the observation data from the sensors, and sent a massive data dump over the UDP broadcasts (which is great!), but intrigued as to how it knows those data points were not received given that it’s done over UDP and it doesn’t care what’s listening (if anything)… Is it simply queueing those up if it has no network connection at all? Or does it know that they didn’t make it to the cloud server?

Great fault tolerance on that front, but I wish this thing wasn’t so flaky on the network side. Ethernet option (with PoE) would be a definite improvement if it’s going to use an overly finicky wireless chipset (also, only supporting 2.4GHz/802.11n is a definite design miss in my book, since the 2.4 GHz band is already almost unusable in most residential environments). Since the wireless module in this device is a fairly common off-the-shelf one, is it possible to replace it with something more modern without major code changes? IoT devices like this are well suited to 802.11ax, especially since the UDP segments it’s sending out only once every few seconds are a whopping 101 bytes, meaning that any wireless frame needs to be padded with about 10x as much null data, consuming vastly more airtime (and power) than is necessary.

I don’t think they use UDP for the data connection to the server. The UDP is just for your convenience so you can grab the data for your own purpose. I wouldn’t worry at all about 1 packet of udp data every few seconds. The power needed (by the hub) to do that is very little, and this one packet shouldn’t interfere a lot with any other device. My hub rarely disconnects from the network, but when it does, it tries to go online automatically. Are you constanly trying to connect with bluetooth?
Some routers do disconnect in order to find a better band to connect. Does it help to put the hub closer to the wifi router?

The UDP packets are strictly for devices on your network. The data sent to WeatherFlow is via MQTT. It knows what data was not sent because it lost WiFi.

At this point you should submit a ticket and let the staff investigate.

Tried that. haven’t heard a peep.

I had the station go offline for a bit, but that seems to be a signal issue between the station and the hub (and also discovered that the readings are accumulated on the station, not the hub, so I’m guessing the lack of an MQTT confirmation to the cloud is what causes the station to store the reading instead.

The Hub only supports 2.4GHz, so it’s not going to be attempting to find a different band. The wifi has been eliminated as a potential cause - It does this no matter what access point it’s connected to, and the crashes/disconnect do not correlate to low RSSI events (the Wi-Fi RSSI on the hub is around -40dBm which is a solid signal) on either end of the wifi link. There are no disassociation frames being sent by the access point when these disconnects happen.

When it’s disconnected from the wifi, the bluetooth via the app still works, but I don’t use that frequently.

The RSSI between the station and the hub is down around -80dBm though, which isn’t great, although I haven’t dug into the protocol to see how it’s being modulated/encoded - it’s not a huge amount of data, so it probably doesn’t need a whole lot of SNR (would be useful if SNR was reported, though)

I should have said a different channel. Of course it still is using the 2.4Ghz.

-80dBm isn’t a lot. Given that you say the wifi signal is strong (-40), perhaps you could move the hub to a different location.

That’s strange. @eric Can you check on this?

Hi Ian2,

Are you using a wifi mesh networking product?

The observations are stored on the hub and the station. The station will store about one hour of data and the hub can store a little over 7 days of data. Gary is correct that the hub uses MQTT to publish the data to our servers and that how the hub knows which observations have been sent.

No, not using mesh. All APs are wired, doesn’t appear to be a roaming issue (I’ve isolated it in a space with only one AP visible). Auth is WPA2-PSK.

No other devices on the network are having this issue.

Last 7 days of uptime and RSSI. manual restart every time for it to come up. No rhyme or reason for the disconnects that I can see… Whether it stays up for 5 minutes or 5 hours is a total crapshoot.


Overnight, the hub appears to have rebooted on its own, and then lost connection an hour later.

Hello ian2

Did you open a ticket with support ? There isn’t much we can do more.

Yep, haven’t heard a peep.