Help needed: Transporter no longer connects to Wi-Fi

[JoeMuc2009]

Hi everyone,

one of my two Transporters fails to connect to Wi-Fi since this morning, out of nowhere. The four Booms and the other Transporter in the apartment have no issues.

I did Xilinx and factory resets and checked multiple Wi-Fi cards from my stock. Depending on the card, I either don't see my SSID at all, or it takes very long, or is visible immediately. In cases where I can select the SSID, I can also see the connection strength varies between 70 and 80%. I can enter the password (double-checked I entered it correctly) but it never gets beyond the subsequent step "Connecting...". It times out after 30 seconds. What would follow is usually the question whether I want DHCP or a manual IP address. It never gets there.
An attempt to connect to a 2.4GHz Wi-Fi hotspot provided by my cellphone failed as well.
Checked my router and it has no new restrictions or anything that might explain this. The Transporter in question connects okay via wired Ethernet, albeit with infrequent new trouble sometimes. In one of my connection attempts, the entire device was super slow and display animations were freeze-framed. In that state it did not react to any user input, too. Like the CPU is running only on a fraction of its usual speed. Another factory reset cured this for now but I'm in serious doubts now.
Could be that I have one the models suffering from a dying CPU, and this could be the start of it.

Anybody around who recognizes any of this?

Thank you all! Cheers,
Joe

[chill]

Hi Joe - I don't have a Transporter, but is it possible that this is caused by a failing 5v power supply? Apparently it's a common failure point. Could it be becoming 'noisy'?

[JoeMuc2009]

Thank you for the fast response. I forgot to mention that I checked a new PSU already, to no avail.
I think once work is done for the week I will spend some time trying to reflash the firmware, maybe something is out of order there.
Will keep y'all updated.

[Heuer]

Agreed, the PSU is a known failure point and i always keep a spare to hand. There is information somewhere on the Forum of where to buy or at least the specifications.

[chill]

I forgot to mention that I checked a new PSU already, to no avail.

Haha - I'll admit I did think it was odd that you, of all people, had not considered this! Evidently you had. Good luck!

[leadears]

Probably not relevant but: my transporter can sometimes hang on "Connecting..." if it loses contact with LMS for some reason [1]. A hard reset is sometimes required to get it back, similarly if LMS has a different IP address assigned (sloppy on my part). I've also encountered infrequent wifi ' shenanigans' with hosts not being able to join the network, normally fixed by restarting the effected wifi/powerline/host(s), these are related to a known 'feature' of tp-link powerline adapters [2].

[1] A couple of times in 12 months
[2] They can become DHCP servers

[JoeMuc2009]

Probably not relevant but: my transporter can sometimes hang on "Connecting..." if it loses contact with LMS for some reason [1]. A hard reset is sometimes required to get it back, similarly if LMS has a different IP address assigned (sloppy on my part). I've also encountered infrequent wifi ' shenanigans' with hosts not being able to join the network, normally fixed by restarting the effected wifi/powerline/host(s), these are related to a known 'feature' of tp-link powerline adapters [2].

[1] A couple of times in 12 months
[2] They can become DHCP servers

Thank you thank you thank you!

Well, the IP never changed, neither the router's nor the DHCP address allocated for that specific Transporter. But you gave me the idea to check back with my DHCP server (which is a Windows 2012 R2 Server running my AD + DNS + DHCP services). Found two entries in there for the same Transporter! No idea how that could happen but after cleaning up both, the Transporter connected all fine, also over Wi-Fi, got the first free address which is the same it used to have before, and that's the end of the story.
Some more observations: despite the fact that I ended the personal Wi-Fi hotspot on my smartphone hours ago, it would still list the SSID, along with other SSIDs, the list again contained all but mine. It needed another factory reset to actually refresh the SSID. After that, it no longer contained by personal hotspot but showed my home SSID again. Funny, seems to be some caching involved there, where it really shouldn't be.
So I did not get to the point where I can determine whether the DHCP server is used or not, but the firmware seems to analyze what can be found on the net up to that point. And as the DHCP would not deliver fully valid data, that might have caused the Transporter to hang around for 30 seconds. Whatever, I would love to understand this better but that would require Logitech to disclose more than they want to.

Anyway, consider this solved. I'll use the weekend to recover from the shock thanks for your replies!
Cheers,
Joe

[d6jg]

That’s not really a Logitech issue. It’s quite common for a DHCP server to fail in that way but of course most people run the DHCP on their router so a reboot here would usually fix it. Microsoft would have you believe that everything works better with an AD server that provides DHCP and DNS but my experience suggests that this is often not the case.
Glad you fixed it though.

[Heuer]

Use Pi-Hole for your DNS server. Runs on your RPi, blocks ads plus a sorts of nasties. https://pi-hole.net/