Won't connect to Channel above 11 - CC3000 does support it

Getting Started
1

From reading the forum I guess my shiny new spark won’t work because it’s limited to scanning up to wifi channel 11. I’m on 12 here in the UK and not in a position to change down.

From the issues log:
“Channels above 11. This is in particular an international issue; if you are outside the U.S., your Wi-Fi router might run at channels 12, 13, or 14, which the CC3000 does not support. Please use channels numbered 11 or lower.”

The CC3000 happily supports channels above 11. I have an adafruit breakout working fine on channel 12 and all it took was changing a single byte value in a call to set wlan_ioctl_set_scan_params

Rob J

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2

So if you build locally (like you must have done to for the Adafruit board) you can make a similar change in the Spark code. It is not any harder than what you did before.

3

cool! I’ll give that a go. Change is simple but local build looks like a pain :confused:

4

Good to know! Maybe we can expose this in a #define somewhere :smile:

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5

Near as I can tell, the firmware never calls wlan_ioctl_set_scan_params so we are getting the defaults. The default channel mask is 0x7ff which means channels 11 down to 1. Allowing users to change this to 0x1fff would enable all 13 channels.

I would think that the logical place to put a call would be SPARK_WLAN_Setup in spark_wlan.cpp.

6

Thanks, I was just wondering where best to put the call. I’ll have a go this evening at a local built with the change in.

Hopefully I’ll only have to get this working once to overwrite the defaults on the CC3000. Since the official firmware never calls wlan_ioctl_set_scan_params those values should never be overwritten and I can then run future OTA updates etc.

cheers,

Rob

7

We were playing with this recently, here’s a gist of how to tell the core to connect on the upper channels:

Enjoy!
David

2 Likes
8

so this will allow channels 13 or lower?
for some reason my router can go to channel 14? and my wifi sniffer can pick up channel 14 aswell even though ive never seen it before

9

802.11b channel 14 can only be legally used in Japan. I believe that the TI CC3000 only goes up to channel 13.