The robot went silent every five minutes

For weeks teleop had the same symptom: it worked fine for a while and then stalled. The arm stopped following, the video froze, sometimes everything dropped. I investigated it with Claude Code, session by session, writing everything down in a log. I ruled out one hypothesis after another: any of them could be real, none explained the pattern.

September 15, 22:45

That night, 38 seconds into a test, everything dropped. The teleop program was still running on the robot, with nobody connected.

I looked at the headset's connections at two moments half a minute apart: not a single byte had arrived on any of them. It wasn't a bad connection: it was silent.

The system logs had the answer. Almost exactly every five minutes, the robot's wifi started looking for other networks, and while it searched it stopped transmitting for about five seconds. Most of the time the search cancelled itself; when it didn't, that was the outage.

Why it was searching

• —It came configured from the factory to save power.
• —The school network has several access points with the same name, and the signal in the lab was weak, so the robot kept looking for a better one.

That beat every earlier hypothesis: if the wifi drops, everything drops, no matter which program you use.

What we did

I didn't touch the network that day: changing wifi settings over the same wifi you're connected through had already locked me out once. The fix ended up being that the robot runs its own network and stops looking for others.

But what stuck with me most was something else: when it dropped, teleop kept running for seven minutes with no operator, until I stopped it by hand. In the panel's remote control, if the connection drops, the robot stops by itself.

What I take from it

• —If something "works fine for a while and then stalls", look for something that repeats. Timestamps tell the story.
• —Measure silence, not just errors.
• —A system that moves a robot has to assume the connection will drop.