This time, the fault was in the debugger, not the device!
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So last night I wanted to stay home a watch a movie. Simple: I copied all my DVD's to MP4 on my NAS yonks ago, so all I do is select my Chromecast on my TV, open Localcast on my phone or tablet, tell it which file and off it goes.
Except last night, when Chomecast couldn't find my network. The phone and tablet did, no hassle so I went through the startup procedure, tried a hard reset, nothing at all. Wierd, it worked the night before! But then, the Chromecast is quite old, maybe it's just burnt out it's WiFi chips. Order a new one, and fine I have to buy a "preowned" one, or pay £100 for a new Google jobbie - the Tv Streamer. With some reluctance I tell Amazon to send it and abandon movie for the night.
Less than 12 hours later, the lady turns up with my new device, and I plug it in and connect it up. Works like a charm, except Localcast can't see it, and Google removed it from the play store... Works fine with Kodi though, so I'll use that.
Then today, I need to use another of my old devices, and ... it can't connect to WiFi. Now one device is a device fault, two is a router problem ... and it was indeed - changing the 2.4GHz channel number on my router from 1 to 6 and the device works. And so does the Chromecast! The reason I discounted a router problem was that my phone, my tablets, everthing had WiFi without problems - but they are all new (or at least new-ish) and use 5GHz (either together with or instead of 2.5GHz) so I never even considered the router as the problem source.
Annoying - I now have a Tv Streamer box I don't need - but the worse thing is that I didn't debug the problem correctly and check all the router frequencies; I assumed it was working fine because other devices worked.
Sometimes, it pays to step back from a problem and look again at what evidence you have of a failure. This time, the fault was in the debugger, not the device! :laugh:
[edit]And last night when I tried again, Localcast could see the new device, so I didn't need Kodi after all. :sigh: [/edit]
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Oh, the time I've wasted debugging the wrong code!
I've started thinking that when my brain says "The fault can't be here." It's my subconscious saying,"That's what she said."
