Hello!
I had been looking into this issue without much success, and then I put the Hex-Net in a drawer, frustrated. But yesterday night the "check engine light" came up, forcing me to do something. Here is a recap on the situation:
We live in California, and I received the Hex-Net for Christmas; I tried configuring the Hex-Net using the web interface on the device. After many failures, I removed the password on our home WiFi network, and I was finally able to connect the Hex-Net in STA mode. However, the connection was very flimsy. In our driveway I can connect to the WiFi using my iPad or Macbook, with a fairly strong signal, but the Hex-Net does see only a weak signal. That's a "receiver sensitivity" issue. I work in that field, and I know how difficult/lengthy/expensive it is to design a WiFi product. Antenna design is hard, and often times the drivers from the chipset manufacturer have shortcomings and bugs. Add the manufacturing variations, and it becomes a nightmare. I'd be happy to share my engineering experience with you on that topic. The bottomline is that it is very hard to make a WiFi product work enclosed inside a metal car, in a driveway, even 50 feet away from the router!
I was able to run some auto-scan tests, but I was not able to upload them (because the connection would drop?).
Then in early January we moved to Chicago to teach for the winter quarter, and we live in an apartment on campus. It's cold, very cold, making it harder to work on the car in the street. Here we don't have a WiFi, we fully rely on our cell phones. We both have iPhones (5c, 5s, 6) and we connect our computers and iPads to the iPhone hotspot. So, we have extensive experience with the Hotspot feature.
First, I was unable to configure the Hex-Net using the embedded web server. I tried configuring our Hotspot network, but run into bugs and instabilities. Finally I followed your advice (thanks!) and used my macbook to configure the Hex-Net network, through the USB and Java app. That worked, and I was able to connect the Hex-Net to my phone Hotspot. Once the connection is established, it is strong and stable, because of the proximity of the phone. However, in the last 2 months I have succeeded in connecting to the Hex-Net only 4 or 5 times. I would spend hours shivering in my car, trying to get the Hex-Net to connect, resetting it, etc.. After an hour of trial, the Hex-Net would finally connect.
My understanding: The iPhone Hotspot tries to save power, so the iPhone broadcast its beacons not too often, far less often than a regular WiFi router. Also, the iPhone Hotspot relies on Bluetooth to send more beacons. Bluetooth being low power, the iPhone can send frequent Bluetooth beacons, and infrequent WiFi beacons. That's why the Hotspot works best with another Apple product, which uses the Bluetooth beacons to help connect to the Hotspot.
Finally, the Hotspot feature seem to work better with the newer phones. When we upgraded our 5c to a 6, we got better connectivity to our computers.
How to make the Hex-Net work better? I think it should be placed into a "focused" mode, where it knows to expect an STA connection, and fully focus on connecting to it. At the moment, I think the Hex-Net is in "dual-mode" and still broadcast an AP signal, while searching for an STA in parallel. Also, I thing the Hex-Net is in constant "scan" mode, instead of being focused on connecting to a preferred WiFi. Also, because the Hex-Net is powered by the car, there is no need for power saving, and it should crank up the radio receiver and the update frequency, and essentially behave like a desktop computer trying connect to a WiFi network. I suspect you use a "mobile" device driver and an embedded Linux OS, which would make the Hex-Net behave like a battery powered device, and save power at the expense of WiFi connectivity.
Finally, you could add a Bluetooth chip to listen to the iPhone beacons. You wouldn't be able to connect with it, because you won't have an MFi chip, but you could detect the beacons and use them to help wi the eWiFi connection. However, that's a lot of money spent for a workaround, and the best option I believe is to use BLE.
The Hex-Net only needs a gateway, and the data streams are moderate, and WiFi is really impractical, so I think the best route is BLE. Low cost, easy to connect, background refresh, etc.. I feel that you chose a WiFi system because you did not want to go the MFi route, and BLE was too new when you designed the Hex-Net. But nowadays BLE is accessible and robust, and I believe it is a superior solution for the Hex-Net.
That was a long email; hopefully that's useful to you and others.
I will now fish my Hex-Net from the drawer and try it out another time.
