Communication Failure

I recently set up an old first revision RPi in the garage with a DS18B20 sensor wired, set to monitor external ground temperature and broadcast via MQTT it was also intended to perform some other functions such as garage door monitor & perhaps i’d add a PIR for alerts etc

Originally it was connected via cable to an old router running DD-WRT as a repeater and as such i could always ping it or ssh into it.

Now i’ve changed to an Orbi mesh system consisting of a router + two satellites and the RPi is connected via a USB wireless key at first it was ok for a few hours then seemingly i lost connection so i did all the usual tricks such as disable wireless power management with sudo iwconfig wlan0 set power_save off or similar and when checking i can see it reports as off & things worked well for a while but again it failed to respond to ping or ssh as shown by;

however weirdly i was also messing around with termux on the phone and decided for no reason at all to ping the address lo and behold we have life! and i can ssh in, update etc

Rebooting the RPi from termux i had hoped it would respond back to the PC but again it reports as dead.

Very strange.

Much later in the day i tried a different Windows machine and that works and so going on an Windows updating spree i tried again and it now works. I repeat very strange perhaps when the RPi has apparently become uncommunicative before it was actually the windows drivers on my laptop?? Lesson learned! before losing temper with the pi & launching it into space is too ping it from another device.