My 2024 core spent all of last season mowing a large portion of a 6 acre property without issues. This season, I’m having nothing but connectivity issues and frustration. Here’s a summary of the situation. I’d love some explanation from Yarbo on this.
- Nothing about the physical install changed. DC location is the same, Dock location is the same, no structures on the property have changed, no new or trees, the environment is EXACTLY the same.
- The DC is installed on my detached garage, full and unobstructed view of the sky. The Dock sits on the opposite side of the house from the garage. While docked, HaLow connection = true, Signal can range anywhere from -74 to -91db (No idea why it is fluctuating that much in a fixed location)
- Wifi coverage around the house is excellent. -60 or better at the location of the dock.
Here is what is making me nuts. If I try to just have the core use HaLow, most of the time I can’t connect using the app (network problem) unless I use bluetooth. This makes sense if the HaLow signal is lower than about -78 to -80db. That pretty much makes the robot useless because this is a second home and I’m only there once every few weeks.
What I’ve tried in an attempt to resolve this:
- Checked all antenna connections, tried removing rubber washers, tried new antennas = no improvement
- I have a second data center, so I replaced the DC, keeping the same install location = no improvement
- Since I have excellent Wifi coverage and this is advertised as having multiple networking path options, I tried using Wifi. = This is great when I first turn it on and the robot is docked, I can start a plan and life is good UNTIL the robot returns to recharge. When departing to run a plan, it gets out away from the house, Halow picks up and it runs the plan. When it returns, it successfully docks, starts recharging, and then never reconnects to wifi, so its basically dead on the dock at that point since it hangs onto the HaLow connection that has unusable signal now where it was perfectly fine all last season.
Something has changed. I don’t know if Yarbo mucked up the HaLow radio transmit power on the two units in a firmware update or what, but HaLow performance has degraded since last season and the network path selection logic in core is pretty useless. When is Yarbo going to finally fix the networking stack in core so that it is able to properly make use of multipath networking to maintain and select forwarding paths properly? Its not exactly hard to validate all available network pathways and update routing based on simple tracker metrics. Heck, just look at or add MWAN to your software stack running in core.
Reinstalling everything because Yarbo made changes that broke an existing deployment isn’t really an option for me. For security reasons, there is only one location on my property where the dock can be placed and spending upwards of $1000 on a boom lift rental and all of the other necessary stuff to move the DC to the one other possible location it could be installed that would have better coverage isn’t practical. This shouldn’t be a problem if the network stack in core worked properly when managing multiple connections.