Wifly not responding

Wireless & IoT
1

I’ve got the breakout board version of this unit and am wondering if anyone has experienced the same thing and how they may have solved it.

My issue is probably wiring since I’m new at this (hope I didn’t destroy it already). I have my Wifly hooked up to the Koala proto board running off lithium power (voltage reads 3.2V on the Koala). So I’m using TX, RX, VDD-BATT and GND and I’ve jumpered 3.3V-ROUT to 3.3V-RIN. I’m using the FTDI interface on the Koala.

Using Teraterm, I keep receiving “Wi” repeatedly, about every second. There doesn’t appear to be any response to $$$. I should expect to see a greeting or a response of CMD at some point, correct?

Thanks in advance for any advice.

2

Success. I rewired it to use the SUPPLY wiring option instead of BATT from the WiFly documentation.

3

any tips on how to get the WiFly to make a TCP or UDP connection and echo received data? Mine is able to ping things in ‘CMD’ mode but I can’t figure out how to push or pull any data.

4

I’ve just given this scenario a test run. Once you’ve configured the WiFly to point to a specific host server, you can then jumper the RX/TX pins together (cheating?). Anything your host server writes out will be echoed back. I’ve written a small java app to prove this. The reverse direction will also work, the WiFly hosting on its telnet port and you using a telnet client.

For UDP, I just found that the WiFly sends out a UDP heartbeat every 8 seconds by default. I’m not sure if that will be useful for you, but it proves the WiFly is sending.

A final note is that the WiFly can’t have multiple connections open. It cannot host telnet and actively connect to a host server at the same time.

Hope this is along the lines of what you need.

5

Neat, thanks. I was able to send data to the module last night with a simple python script; it echoed the received characters back to the terminal. This was UDP; I think it listens for connections by default when the UDP protocol is set.

Tonight I’ll try to set up a TCP connection so the WiFly can send stuff the other way (like you suggested). Thanks!

For others seeking marginal WiFly guidance, my notes are here: http://weakorbit.com/pnotes/ The WiFly documentation is kind of lacking if you don’t know much about internet protocols and data transmission (my case). I think the WiShield has better documentation but this device didn’t yet support DHCP so I had to go with WiFly. What I mean to say is, WiFly was a little tricky for a beginner like myself but seems now to be manageable.