A few years ago I wrote about a budget backyard audio solution I’d come up with after discovering cheap 4-channel amplifiers and the now discontinued Echo Input. Since the writing of that article some things have changed. Of the four rock speakers I bought, two lost their ability to produce lows. Either their woofers died or the wires disconnected. I’ve since replaced them with Monoprice omnidirectional outdoor speakers (that don’t seem to be available right now so I can’t link to them. It also turned out that the speaker cable I’d used was not outdoor rated, and had I just paid closer attention for nearly the same price I wouldn’t have had cables that oxidized from end to end after one year. I wound up having to replace all of the cables anyway after I renovated my backyard and they were torn up by a backhoe.
The focus of this article, though, is the simplest part of this solution. The Echo. Once my renovation was complete, we noticed the pool house we’d replaced our old shed with had thicker walls and therefore wasn’t getting good wifi reception from the router in our house. I decided to put a second node on our AiMesh network, which came with its own struggles. The node sits high up in the 10’x14′ building and receives good signal from the other router. I have a number of connected devices in there already, including a Govee LED Light Strip (I wish I’d discovered RGBIC before I cut and installed this one), and a 4k Amazon Fire Stick. These devices, and our phones when we are out there, easily switch between nodes as one would expect would happen in a mesh network. There was no configuration involved to make these devices work, and everyone is happy.
Last weekend, while everyone was enjoying the freezing cold pool, my wife kept complaining that the music kept cutting out. The Echo Input was clearly losing internet connection and only occasionally able to regain it. Frustrated and confused I first thought the device was overheating. It was nearly 90 degrees and quite warm in the pool house, so I opened the doors, turned on the fan and a couple of minutes later it connected again. Only for the rest of the day it kept dropping connection. I switched to a spare Echo Dot I had lying around and had the same results almost immediately. This had to be a network issue.
I loaded up my network administration page on my phone and went to the AiMesh menu. There I selected my new node and checked to see what devices were connected. I saw two phones, a tablet, the Govee lights, the Fire Stick, and two other Amazon devices that were clearly the Dot and Input. I could see traffic to and from all of the devices except the Echo’s. This didn’t make any sense.
After moving the devices to the front of the building, they picked up the node in the house, rather than the node just a few feet away from them, and immediately started working. Only now they were too far from the amp to connect to its bluetooth. So I moved them back to the rear of the building, where they quickly switched to the local node and lost connection. I tried binding them to the local node, which ensured they’d never work no matter where I placed them, and then bound them to the node in the house, which returned them to a condition of spotty connection.
At this point I’ve proved that either Echo devices are not compatible with an Asus RT-66u b1 on either 2.4ghz or 5ghz wifi (which would be incredibly strange), or that for some reason I cannot begin to fathom, on an AiMesh network these devices are somehow bound to the main node.
This is still an ongoing issue for me, and to this point I’ve found one other person on reddit who had a similar unresolved issue. Should I find anything out I will update this article. Until then I’m using an old Fire 7 to drive my outdoor audio.
