IoT device's soft access point module dropping out at trade show

Question

I have been developing a Wi-Fi remote access IoT device for an electrical control to display at an engineering trade show coming up. Unfortunately I was unable to attend this trade show due to health reasons

The problem is that my fellow employees were unable to successfully connect to the IoT device in soft access point mode. They reported seeing it in their Wi-Fi devices and being able to connect to it, but then having the Wi-Fi connection drop out.

Being a engineering trade show I am guessing that there would be lots of IoT devices and sometimes in large crowds I have experience my mobile phone network go down. Could other IoT devices be fighting for the Wi-Fi channels and hijacking our connection? I’m confused as I never experience this in the workspace environment while developing the firmware.

Answer 1

Having been to many a trade show, there are a few things to set when on the expo floor:

1. Hide the AP name. Most devices won't try and connect if they can't see the AP name.
2. Look for a channel that is least used and set the AP to use it.
3. connect all you can via wired Ethernet to minimize the number of WiFi nodes trying to connect to the AP. We had the same issues you had at an Intel show, until we hard-wired the MQTT Broker to the AP...then things worked great.
4. turn down the transmit power...if all they are connecting to is in your booth, then cut the Transmit power by half....if you have an AP that can do that. I always bring along a DD-WRT AP node that has the ability to inspect channels and modify transmit power.