WiFly RN-XV Bad Packets

Development Boards Arduino
1

I’ve been wrestling with the WiFly RN-XV connected to the Arduino via the Wireless SD Shield for a while

I have the WiFly connected via hardware serial (Pins 1 & 2) and debugging going through software serial

I continue to have problems with bad data. The strange thing is that data sent out by the WiFly is fine, but any data I try sending to the WiFly from another device (Mac, iPhone, etc)…the data frequently gets garbled.

So I put in my own CRC32 data in the packet data and wrote my own data check and resend code, but it’s just amazingly frustrating that I am only sending small packets of 30 to 50 bytes at a time and I still have this issue.

I’ve tried both UDP and TCP, but even TCP exhibits the same problem. And the problem becomes extremely severe if I try sending data to the WiFly over a busy Wifi network versus a quiet one.

One a quiet network, I might only have to resend a packet 1 out of 10 times. On a busy network I seem to have to resend just about every packet, and every packet has to be resent 4 or 5 times before it gets into the WiFly intact.

Any ideas of what might be going on here?

2

Radio frequency communications always have to deal with random as well as man made noise, and this is what you are seeing. That it seems to be mostly in one direction suggests that either the receiver in the WiFly is inferior in some way, the primary noise source is closer to the WiFly or the transmitter on the other end is less powerful.