Health reports and stability of connection in saturated Wi-Fi environments

[oscgonfer]

This issue is to map the potential solutions to prevention and diagnosis of issues in saturated WiFi environments. These environments are still under assessment, but WiFi networks with many devices connected at the same time, where connections are slow even for a laptop, have been presenting issues for the kit connection stability.

Diagnosis

This is mostly done by publishing more information to the platform. Directly linked to fablabbcn/smartcitizen-api#238 in terms of health metrics.

Status

• Implemented WiFi strength signal and SD card presence as sensors
• Send health report on reboot in hardware_info mqtt. See above issue for more details on back-end side

Current implementation in hardware_info is done, but we need to check if we want to send something else:
https://github.com/fablabbcn/smartcitizen-kit-21/blob/dev/sam/src/SckBase.cpp#L805-L858

Prevention

This would be the main topic of discussion of this issue, although there is no preliminary good solution from firmware side. On the hardware side there will be better options with other chipsets. Currently, thanks to the integration of the Flash, there is maybe no need to do anything, but ideas welcome.