Need Help getting Wifi back up and running

I built my heater meter almost two years ago and have loved using it as often as i can. Last week I inexplicably lost wifi connection had to do a cook offline. The horror! My efforts to restore wifi have been unsuccessful.

I am using an Edimax EW-7811Un 150Mbps 11n Wi-Fi USB Adapter

I noticed that the wifi adapter was not lighting up. I did some searching on the forum and saw that an unseated memory card is a likely culprit. I opened the case and sure enough, the card was halfway out of its slot. Reseated the card, powered back up, and it looked like everything was fixed. At startup the wifi adapter lights up and blinks happily and the Heatermeter LCD reports that the network IP is the usual address (192.168.1.149 in my case, static). Unfortunately, I am still unable to raise the device from my PC at that address. Remote access to the HM was only possible via network cable on 192.168.200.1

Steps I have taken:
1) Deleted the wireless connection from OpenWrt and repeated the network setup instructions per the wiki. Setup went as expected (appeared to work) but I still cannot access the HM via wireless.

2) Downloaded the latest OpenWrt firmware image and wrote the image to the SD card. Reinstalled the card, booted up and repeated step 1. No joy.

3) Restored HM to original config reflashing the OpenWrt image (via System->Backup/Flash Firmware) and unchecking "keep configuration." Followed directions for wireless setup, which again went as expected but ultimately failed to allow me to access the HM at the IP address that is displayed on the HM at startup. Under the new software, i can at least access the HM via network cable without having to change my PC to the .200 subnet (which is nice, btw) but I'm out of ideas.

I haven't tried to ssh into the pi or to connect a display and keyboard and check things out that way. I'm a bit unfamiliar with those methods but will definitely give them a try if it gets me around this.

Any thoughts?

Are you sure nothing has changed in your WiFi router? You might try releasing the static IP and letting DHCP assign an IP to the HM instead and see if you get access on that IP.... Also, the new firmware by default comes up in Access Point mode, did you change that over to client mode?

RalphTrimble said:

Are you sure nothing has changed in your WiFi router? You might try releasing the static IP and letting DHCP assign an IP to the HM instead and see if you get access on that IP.... Also, the new firmware by default comes up in Access Point mode, did you change that over to client mode?

Click to expand...

Confirmed that the HM is in client mode.

As for the other part, that did the trick. I eliminated the DHCP reservation for the HM on the router and rebooted everything. Came back up and the router assigned an IP that was displayed on the LCD. Checked access on the PC and everything looks good. Since I prefer to use a single static IP I changed the settings from DHCP to Static and gave it the IP that I want. Rebooted and it's back to functioning on the correct IP! Thanks!

I assume this problem originated by setting up static ip on the HM and setting up a reservation on the router. If i recall, only one of the two is necessary.

One quibble: Now that I'm back on static IP the HM no longer displays the IP address at bootup. Not a huge problem since I damn well know the IP address, but still... it has always done it and I don't know why it stopped.

Glad it worked out, and yah, you should only have to do either static IP at the HM or IP reservation on the router....
I have also had the HM fail to show the IP upon connection, though I am not sure it is a static IP thing cause I know in the past it has shown my static IP at boot. I haven't been able to put my finger on the exact scenario that causes the IP not to show.....