Recommendations for operating IMPs in conference/exhibition conditions

General
1

Our commercial team just finished our first conference showcasing our IMP-based products. By all accounts the demonstrations went well. However, they did report ongoing problems with maintaining connections in a crowded radio environment. The hotel-supported (exorbitantly-expensive) wifi blared over everything else, and I would also be suspicious whether the hotel employed any de-authentication tech to make BYO wifi APs unstable. In order to get seamless performance in such an environment, does the Electric Imp team have any recommendation on how to get the best level of (read: most reliable) performance out of the IMPs in these conditions?

I’m also curious about memory use for imp.scanwifinetworks() in busy areas? I checked out an imp yesterday that returned about 50 visible APs. By my calculations, that’s about 20+K of RAM. Is there a limit? An imp002 with limited available RAM might struggle.

2

Scanning will take heap memory, I’m not sure whether there’s an API limit to the number of networks returned though. Someone from the imp team can likely elaborate more.

In terms of conferences - I have to say that the best bet is 5GHz, which is significantly less crowded. If your local regulations allow, you could also try using channel 13 (ensuring the imps are configured to a country code that allows ch13 access).