Photon Wifi hardware not identical?

Hardware
1

Hi all,

do Photon’s have different antenna or other Wifi related hardware built in?

I have two Photons loaded with the same program and same firmware (0.4.7). The code gets the Wifi signal via WiFi.RSSI() every 5 seconds. If both Photons are located next to each one has way better signal strength then the other?

{"name":"Wifi","data":"{\"Wifi\": \"Mein W-LAN\", \"Signal\": -56}","ttl":"60","published_at":"2016-01-23T19:18:20.929Z","coreid":"300040001647343337363432"}
{"name":"Wifi","data":"{\"Wifi\": \"Mein W-LAN\", \"Signal\": -82}","ttl":"60","published_at":"2016-01-23T19:18:23.112Z","coreid":"25002c000447343339373536"}

Close to the router the difference gets little lower, but the farther away from the router the difference gets larger.
The photon with the lower signal strength sometimes also takes way longer for cloud connect, > 2 minutes.

I already cleared the Wifi credentials and rerun the setup of both Photons, result is the same.

Any idea?
Thx
Markus

2

Found the problem myself :grinning:

For testing the external antenna I used STARTUP(WiFi.selectAntenna(ANT_EXTERNAL));. Looks like this setting persists even if I reflash with a total different program (with no WiFi.selectAntenna statement). I was not aware of this behavior.
Setting STARTUP(WiFi.selectAntenna(ANT_AUTO)); only once on a test program repairs the Wifi connection.

3 Likes