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Mastiff
June 29th, 2003, 10:51 AM
Well, students, I have now conducted very rigorous, long-winded and strictly scientific tests of connection speeds from NetRemote to two different MC hosts under different conditions. Let's first present the candidates.

Hardware:

1. Fujitsu-Siemens PocketLoox with a Trend TEW-222CF compact flash WLAN card

2. HP Ipaq 5450 with built-in WLAN

Connection: Infrastructure mode with Trend BRP-311 22 mbit network bridge/access point/broadband router (with router part deactivated, I'd really kill for DSL by now!)

Software: NetRemote RC6, latest remote server on two hosts running MC, both hostname mode with PocketHosts defining hostnamesand IP address mode.

Method: Opening NetRemote (separate tests - not simultaneous), turning off PPC and waiting until the connection indicator frame in the CCF turns from red to green.

Findings: Hardware did not affect connection time at all. Hostname or IP address did not change anything either (which is as expected since PocketHosts made sure that the hosts file on the PPC pointed to the correct IP address). But signal strength did! With a good signal the connection times varied from 7 seconds and up to 8,5 seconds. With increasingly worse signal strenght the times went gradually up to 12 seconds at the most.

Conclusion: The connection time is prolonged because of the technology of WLAN, not NetRemote. As for bluetooth I have no idea since I never got that crap (pardon the very unintellectual language, this is something I feel very strongly about after several lost hours experimenting without anything else to show for it than headaches and an increased vocabulary in "french") working at all for anything else than connection to a Bluetooth cellphone.

And that concludes the lesson for today, students. You are dismissed. If there's sufficient interest I will hold my next course in connection times in Ad-hoc-mode.

sapnho
June 30th, 2003, 03:37 PM
Thank you Master for this most inspiring lesson. However, this makes any WiFi solution like NetRemote only a secondary remote in addition to a pronto. You just don't want to wait 8 seconds to turn the volume down.

However, I'd love to see what's playing on my remote and see the cover, so bidirectionality is key but that only works with the delays...

There is not such thing as a perfect world (yet)! :?

maxtrash
June 30th, 2003, 05:56 PM
I guess the perfect solution would be if Netremote combines both TCP/IP and IR-sending.

It could act very smartly by sending IR before the network connection is established and switching after that :!:

other possibility is to have a choice for each button whether it sends IR or TCP/IP

endless possibilities here but an even bigger scope for ben :?

Mastiff
July 1st, 2003, 10:47 AM
You won't believe this, but yesterday I upgraded to the latest ROM on the Ipaq (from 1.1.10 to 1.11.19), and connection times went up with between 50 and 100 %! So today I went back to the original ROM... Not impressive! :x

sapnho
July 1st, 2003, 03:47 PM
You won't believe this, but yesterday I upgraded to the latest ROM on the Ipaq (from 1.1.10 to 1.11.19), and connection times went up with between 50 and 100 %! So today I went back to the original ROM... Not impressive! :x

Darn!

Ben S
July 2nd, 2003, 07:36 AM
The only other test is whether 802.11g or 802.11a can negotiate communication faster.

Otherwise the only solution for now (without going wired) is to turn the screen light timer to 15 seconds, and set the power timeout to 2+ hours. Unfortunately I'm going to have to add the power timeout to the NetRemote code, unless someone can figure out how to hack the allowed times. My time max is 30 minutes, which is good, but not good enough.

Mastiff
July 2nd, 2003, 07:54 AM
Is it possible to build into NetRemote something that shuts down the light after less than 15 seconds, maybe only 3-5? I always have to turn it upside down when I have done something, the light is so annyoing. 8)