Pixhawk + Wifi = Intererence?

Posted by Maarten Deheegher on August 29, 2015 at 10:58am

I am planning to extend my drone with a raspberry pi for additional sensoring. The pi will have a wifi dongle on it and will be positioned near the pixhawk. Would the wifi dongle cause the pixhawk to malfunction because of the wifi signal interference?

thanks

Maarten

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Replies

  • Developer
    Jaime Machuca September 4, 2015 at 9:15am

    I have also flown planes and quads with Wifi and 2.4Ghz RC. If the Wifi traffic is low, and sporadic, I have not had problems, I have seen some interference when doing large file transfers over Wifi.

  • Michael August 30, 2015 at 11:20pm

    I've used the Raspberry Pi with WiFi on the Iris without any issues. 

    I printed a mount that attached to the underside of the Iris with mounting holes for the Pi.  It's probably within 10cm of the receiver.

    I'm using the Edimax WiFi dongle and I've configured it to use WiFi channel 14, this seems to work quite well. Of course, WiFi range isn't spectacular with the dongle so I'll loose my connection to the Pi if I fly too far away.

    • Michael > Michael August 31, 2015 at 7:19am
      That's correct. WiFi channel 14 sits at the high end of the 2.4Ghz band and has minimal overlap with adjacent channels. It doesn't completely remove the possibility of interference but it has always seemed to work just fine.

      Here's a link for more info on wifi channels:
      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_WLAN_channels
      List of WLAN channels
      WLAN (Wireless local area network) channels are frequently accessed using IEEE 802.11 protocols and are sold mostly under the trademark Wi-Fi. Other…
    • Maarten Deheegher > Michael August 31, 2015 at 4:04am

      And are you using a 2.4 Ghz RC?

  • Paul Meier August 30, 2015 at 5:08am

    Use 5.8 GHz wifi to avoid problems

    • Paul Meier > Paul Meier August 31, 2015 at 8:20am

      Sorry, meant 5 Ghz

  • Steven Adams August 29, 2015 at 9:06pm

    any interference from the wifi is with the radio receiver (if it is also on 2.4), not the pixhawk itself. So if you used a different freq for control e.g. a dragonlink on 433MHz then that'd remove the potential for interference.

    • Maarten Deheegher > Steven Adams August 30, 2015 at 4:21am

      then the wifi would certainly interfere with my spectrum receiver

      thanks for the tip!

  • Ryan August 29, 2015 at 12:09pm

    Just a few hours ago we flew with a Pixhawk and raspberry pi connected to an OceanOptics spectrometer. The Pi was mounted about 15 cm below the Pixhawk and we didn't experience any issues.

  • Shannon Henstorf August 29, 2015 at 11:14am

    I can't say for certain that it shouldn't, but I have had an Intel Edison on mine with Wifi and Bluetooth. The only interference came from our fpv transmitter but once we removed it, worked great. 

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