Problem with JetBot with Edimax N150 (Solved)

Robotics
1

I hope someone else finds this useful.

I was playing around with my SparkFun Jetbot and was having endless trouble with keeping the wifi connection alive with the N150 (I even gave up and used ethernet for a while).

I tried a whole host of fixes to resolve the issue: Using a different brand of access point, changing the power saving potions, looking into alternate drivers. Nothing worked. My connection would only last about 1 minute before dying.

I had a hunch that this had to have something to do with network scanning. so I decided to turn up the debug level on NetworkManager and correlate the network dying with what it was doing.

What I found was that the network dying corresponded to the exact time NetworkManager scanned the extra interface, wlan1.

There’s certainly more than one way to deal with this, but I tried creating a file:

/etc/NetworkManager/conf.d/10-no-wlan1.conf

containing:

[keyfile]

unmanaged-devices+=interface-name:wlan1

which prevents NetworkManager from and the issue went away.

2

BTW, one way to quickly test whether this issue is affecting you is to do

sudo ifconfig wlan1 down

That will remove the device and prevent NetworkManager from scanning wlan1 , but will re-appear when the device is unplugged and plugged back in again or the machine is rebooted.