House Wide Wifi Network for Roomba

Product Discussion Pepwave AP & Surf
1

Purchased a Roomba that wanders around vacuuming the house. Pepwave Surf SOHO MK3 is in the middle of the house and its WIFI signal is iffy on either end of the house. The instant the Roomba looses connection to the Internet, it stops and claims its being blocked from returning to homebase.

My goal is to have a single WIFI SSID that has good signal strength all around the house and have the Roomba hand off between the three Wifi access points as it works.

I already have a VLAN setup on the router that includes three of the four hardwired ports and the WIFI. Gave it a VLAN number of 10. The VLAN has been working for several WIFI devices for years. I have two SSIDs, a guest2 and a guest5. I initially had problems with my printer when I tried to have a single SSID for both frequencies. Creating a 2 and 5 SSID fixed that problem.

I have just purchased two Pepwave AP One Mini’s. I’m trying to configure the first.

I am running Firmware 8.1.1 RC2 on my router and whatever came on the AP One. I hadn’t tried to update it yet.

I plugged the first AP One into an ethernet connected to the router. It came up with an IP address of 10.10.50.17 which is in the range of the router’s DHCP server. I connected to the guest2 SSID with my laptop and was able to bring up the AP Ones management interface on 10.10.50.17.

I made the following changes:

  1. Changed admin user name and password
  2. Created a VLAN with same name and VLAN ID of 10
  3. Changed the DHCP to relay and gave it the IP address of the router (10.10.50.1)
  4. Made sure the Ap was in bridge mode.
  5. Changed the authentication string on the default SSID.

I rebooted. My laptop is still connected to the router’s SSID, Laptop had an IP address of 10.10.50.20, but I can not ping or connect to the management interface at 10.10.50.17.

I then tried to connect PEPWAVE_4A76 SSID. I enter the password. It connects, but I get a message that I have limited connectivity. My laptop now has the IP Address of 169.254.228.34 with a subnet mask of 255.255.0.0 without a default router assigned.

What am I doing wrong? Any suggestions?

Also, I can’t be the first person trying to do this. Has anyone written a howto guide you could point me to?

Thanks