I want to prepare my Primo and a Raspberry Pi 3B for a new router. However, I’m a bit confused about whether to enable ‘Hotspot’ and ‘Hotspot Fallback.’
For the descriptions, these two functions seem somewhat similar:
Enable hotspot
“The system will start an enabled hotspot automatically if the wireless network is dropped or no wireless network has been configured. Disable the hotspot feature to prevent this happening.”
And
Hotspot fallback
“If enabled, Hotspot will start when Wireless Network connection is lost. If disabled, the unit will keep on trying to reconnect to a known Wireless network.”
It seems like the first function might also enable a fallback connection, but I’m not entirely sure. From a user’s perspective, this can be quite confusing and potentially lead to unexpected outcomes. Can someone please clarify why there are two separate functions and what the main differences are? Thanks!
I just wrote a reply and then realized it was completely wrong. I thought you could disable Hotspot after configuring your wifi and then keep Hotspot Fallback on on case of problems, but that’s not true. If you disable Hotspot, they are both disabled (don’t do this!) .
So the only difference I can see is that with Fallback enabled, Volumio will offer that hotspot if the configured wifi is unavailable.
Thanks! That’s also my conclusion.
So enabling Hotspot doesn’t really do anything, you also have to enable Hotspot Fallback to get the safety of a fallback network.
It seems strange that these aren’t merged into one option
I tested this and found a difference between the two settings.
While it is seems that you have to enable Hotspot Fallback to get the safety of the fallback hotspot if your usual WiFi isn’t accessible, I find that after you use the fallback to connect to a WiFi network, you have to turn off the fallback to let the Volumio stay logged in to the (new) WiFi network. If I did not do that, every time it reboots it starts the fallback hotspot instead of connecting to the WiFi network. You can re-enable the Hotspot Fallback only after the unit successfully logs into your WiFi network if you want this available again.
I would be interested to know if others can confirm that this is what happens (or should happen) when you try the same steps. Of course, you can always connect an Ethernet cable to reset the WiFi but I was checking this setting in perpetration to taking one of my Volumio units with me when I travel.
