08/21 1130 Monday
We brought 3 products to Strong Angel III – Battery Powered Mobile Wi-Fi Router, Solar powered Wi-Fi Video camera and a Solar powered sensor net.
The Mobile Wi-Fi Router is a slam dunk. Just turn it on and in 30 seconds you have Wi-Fi Internet any time and any place (that is if EVDO/1xRTT is enabled). Case in point, the Mobile Wi-Fi router provided Internet service on the Sunday pre-event briefing. The Mobile Wi-Fi camera has some challenges when being deployed in a ‘dynamic’ (read going up/down often) wireless network.
My plan was to socialize the Mobile Wi-Fi Router with potential users and work through the camera issues on Monday PM after the wireless network was up. I got good traction socializing the Mobile Wi-Fi router but the camera was not easy.
The primary challenge when deploying a mobile Wi-Fi camera is that it needs a port reservation on the primary wireless cloud ‘gateway’ (router) so that users from the Internet can browse the mobile Wi-Fi camera . And this implied that I needed the attention (and special consideration) from the Wireless network managers. Well, the wireless network did not come up and there was considerable hair pulling. I decided to stay clear.
I did manage to make some tests with a Junxion Box, local Wi-Fi access point (thank you Sprint). To my dismay, I could not communicate with the camera, period. It seemed dead like a ‘brick’ as they say. The only difference between the on site operation and our test lab environment is the wired network and related Ethernet ports. Since I did not have a network, I used a cross-over cable to make a direct connect between my computer and the camera. Works every time. Well – WRONG. Not this time. After 2 hours of testing and booting and etc. I realized that an active network is required for the camera to boot properly and under some conditions the laptop does not perform as an active network.
That is the horror story for the day. Nothing that 2-3 hours in the lab didn’t fix, certainly tomorrow will be better. – Keep Smiling.
