FlashAir Card Dropping Connection After a Few Seconds

I've been using a 16GB FlashAir Wifi SD card for over two years to pull data into SleepyHead. I took my machine (ResMed AirCurve 10 ST) with me on a trip over the holidays. Since I returned home I've been unable to connect to the card to pull data.

I brought the card down to my laptop to troubleshoot. I've figured out that when the card is inserted into my laptop and boots, I can ping the card for 5-10 seconds before it disconnects from the wifi. This indicates the configuration on the card is still good. There have been no changes to the router firmware or passwords so that shouldn't be an issue, but I rebooted the router just to eliminate that possibility.

The obvious answer seems to be the FlashAir card is bad somehow but I hate to buy a new one and have the same thing happen.

An entire evening of Googling hasn't turned up anything very helpful. Has anybody seen a similar situation and had any luck in resolving it?

Thanks .....

How far a way from your router is your ResMed and how far away was the laptop when it was hosting the FlashAir?

Mine is about 30 feet, too much more than that and connection speed is slow with a lot of disconnects. If you move the laptop (while hosting the FlashAir) closer to the router does that help?

Two config options that come to mind are noise cancel and retries, they appear in the CONFIG as:
NOISE_CANCEL=2
STA_RETRY_CT=0

The above enables noise cancelation and allow for unlimited retries.

What version FlashAir do you have, mine is w-04. I'm unsure what CONFIG options older versions support, but believe the above are supported by older versions.

The ResMed machine is almost directly above the WiFi router, no further than 15 ft. or so, and the laptop is probably 10-12 ft. from the router and in a straight line of sight with no obstructions. So max distance from the ResMed to the router to the laptop is no more than 25 ft. and has worked flawlessly for two years.

The card is a W-03. The STA_RETRY_CT = 0 is in the CONFIG file for sure, will double check the NOISE_CANCEL line tonight and add it if it's not there.

I will double and triple check tonight to make sure there are no files missing that the card may need but that's a long shot. It's just very strange how the card will boot and connect and will respond to ping commands but then the connection drops after about 10 seconds.

I believe APPAUTOTIME=0 is the setting you may be missing in your config. Below is my post from this thread, viewtopic/t173681/WiFi-SD-card.html?start=15:


I now love my flashair card!

I too was struggling at first because I was trying to use my 5ghz WiFi network. As multicast mentioned, these cards only support 2.4 ghz networks @ 20 Mhz bandwidth.

I found that assigning the flashair card a static ip and then adding these network settings to the config is important as well.

Make sure you also set these 5 parameters in the flashair config:

LOCK=1
DNSMODE=1
APPAUTOTIME=0
UPLOAD=1
STA_RETRY_CT=0

In case you're curious you can find all of the available parameters here:
https://www.flashair-developers.com/en/ ... pi/config/

I created a virtual SD Card on my laptop so I have a permanently available target for Flashpap using the instructions from:
https://wiki.dolphin-emu.org/index.php? ... Card_Guide - section 'Creating a Virtual SD Card'
http://www.ltr-data.se/opencode.html/#ImDisk - Use ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver to mount the virtual card

When I wake up each morning, I simply login to my laptop, 'Scan FlashAir SD Card' in Flashpap, and 'Copy xPAP data for selected dates.' Rescan thinks that I've inserted an sd card because it recognizes new data and prompts me to download. Then I download the previous night's data into Sleepyhead. Maybe 3 minutes spent; Easy - Peasey!

In case some people are still having issues, my stable, working config is below.

Hope this helps someone else!
_______________________________
[WLANSD]

DHCP_Enabled=NO
IP_Address=Insert your static ip
Subnet_Mask=Insert your subnet mask
Default_Gateway=Insert your default gateway

[Vendor]

CIPATH=/DCIM/100__TSB/FA000001.JPG
APPMODE=5
APPNAME=myflashair -- (Whatever hostname you want to give your SD Card. You can also network browse using this name. I.E., '\\myflashair\DavWWWRoot')
APPSSID=Insert your 2.4 Ghz WiFi SSID
APPNETWORKKEY=Insert your WiFi Key
VERSION=F15DBW3BW4.00.03 -- (Make sure you upgrade your flashair card to the latest Toshiba Firmware!)
CID=02544d535733324755e207157a011a01
PRODUCT=FlashAir
VENDOR=TOSHIBA
TIMEZONE=-24
WEBDAV=1
MASTERCODE=Insert any 12-digit alpha numeric key
LOCK=1
DNSMODE=1
APPAUTOTIME=0
UPLOAD=1
STA_RETRY_CT=0

The only other things I can think of, other than the FlashAir starting to fail is:

Are there any new WiFi devices on your network?
Any new 2.4ghz devices in your home (cordless phones, etc)
How congested is your 2.4ghz network? The FlashAir can't use 5ghz.
How comfortable are you configuring your router? If it's a network congestion issue you might want to consider setting your Channel Width to 20MHz if it's set to 40.

The 2.4GHz band is the least used band on the router. Only two or three other things there, none of them new or heavy users of bandwidth.

I'm an IT guy so I'm pretty comfortable with the router config. Nothing there that jumped out at me, but just to be sure I restored the last good configuration backup that I had to eliminate any unexpected changes I may have made. No better result from that.

I'll check the CONFIG file tonight to verify all of the parameters are set as expected from the other responses but I don't expect much to change.

The only other thing I can think of is an IP address conflict.

Are you using DHCP or statically assigning the FlashAir?
If statically assigning, verify it's not in your router's DHCP range.

You were away for a while, could your FlashAir have given up its DHCP lease and now conflicting with another device that has claimed its old IP address. Could another device that has been turned off, while you were gone, given up its DHCP lease and now conflicting with the FlashAirs lease?

Do you see other devices on your network with the same IP address?
You can try pinging your FlashAir's IP while it is turned off to see if another device responds.
Or take a look at your arp table with an arp -a command and see if another device shows up with the same IP, but different MAC address.

The card has a static IP address outside of the routers DHCP pool. Static IP is 192.168.0.90, DHCP pool is 192.168.0.100-199. No other device on that static address, verified by pinging the IP when the card is out of the laptop. I'll double check the arp table tonight when I get home but don't really expect to find anything.

Awfully strange that it connects when it boots up but dies about 10 seconds later. No obvious or discernible messages in the router logs but will double check those again too.

Since it worked for two whole years without issue I'm starting to come to the conclusion that maybe the wireless part of the card is on its last legs.

I have verified that the data saved on the card since my return is good. When the card was in the laptop I copied the files to the SleepyHead import directory and they all pulled into SleepyHead just fine.

It’s likely the wireless transmitter dying in the heat to be honest sounds like you have covered most things.

avaholic wrote: ↑

Wed Jan 02, 2019 9:38 am

I now love my flashair card!

Agreed! And thank you avaholic for the config!!

DaRef wrote: ↑

Wed Jan 02, 2019 7:20 am

I brought the card down to my laptop to troubleshoot. I've figured out that when the card is inserted into my laptop and boots, I can ping the card for 5-10 seconds before it disconnects from the wifi.

I have absolutely the same behavior but my w-04 is new. It seems it's dead on arrival.
Re-flashing and re-formatting doesn't help

Jas_williams wrote: ↑

Wed Jan 02, 2019 3:29 pm

It’s likely the wireless transmitter dying in the heat to be honest sounds like you have covered most things.

Hmm. Despite my previous message I finally made it work.
I moved to my country house where there is only one wifi network - here FlashAir works as expected without any problems.
So it's definitely problem of wifi noise due to many overlapping networks.
I guess we can try to play with channel property.