When creating tracks with Flowfal in the studio, your normal studio WiFi will generally be fine.

However, for a performance, you will probably want to control your own WiFi network to ensure it works reliably:

• You want to have a reliable low latency so that the system is responsive
• You don't want to be competing with other users at a venue for access to a public WiFi system
• Ideally you want to connect your laptop directly to the WiFi router via CAT5 for the lowest latency
• You want to be able to set a password to prevent anyone else connecting to it
• WiFi setup for watches can be tricky, so it helps to have a WiFi network already set up that the watches have been connected to

In order to solve the issues above the easiest solution is to have your own portable WiFi router that you directly connect to your laptop. These routers are inexpensive.

In the past we have good results using:

• TP-Link Portable Wireless Router TL-MR3020
• TP-Link Wireless Router TL-WR710N

Any similar portable WiFi access point should work fine.

The actual latency you will get will vary depending on how many devices you have connected, and how much other radio traffic is around, but to give you some idea we did a test with 5 devices running at once. You can see the results in table below.

Our conclusions from these tests are:

• Apple and Android performance is pretty similar
• Not having the WiFi router directly connected to your laptop via CAT5 (see below) is fine but it does add around 20ms of extra latency to the connection
• The Apple Watch performance is very poor because the data is having to go via the iPhone. Until Apple allow us to send packets directly over WiFi from the watch this is not going to change.

We tested with all 5 devices running at once to simulate a reasonable usage scenario. We tested against two WiFi access points: a Ubiquiti AP AC Lite and a TP-Link MR3020. For each access point we tested with the laptop connected directly to the access point via CAT5, and the laptop connected to the access point via WiFi.

Each router needs to be set up in different ways, but these are the kinds of settings you will need.

WiFi Settings:

• Set the router to operate in standard Access Point mode
• Set the SSID of the WiFi to be the name of your band, performance, or 'Flowfal'
• Set the WiFi security to WPA2-PSK
• Set a strong password for the WiFi connection

Network Settings:

For TP-Link devices you can leave the network settings at their defaults which should mean it assigns the router's IP address uing its "Smart IP" system.

DHCP should be enabled on the router by default. This is the system that gives out IP addresses to the devices that connect to the router. Typical settings should look lile:

• The range of addresses DHCP can give out should be something like 192.168.1.100 to 192.168.1.199.
• You don't need to set anything for the DHCP settings for: Default Gateway, Default Domain or DNS servers.

If your router and laptop both have a CAT5 wired network connection then it is worth connecting the router directly to laptop using a CAT5 cable. It will give you about 20ms better latency (see above).

Using a CAT5 connection improves the latency of the connection from your devices since the laptop is not taking up WiFi bandwidth connecting with the router, and the CAT5 connection will be faster than sending the data from the router to your laptop over WiFi. It also means you can connect to other things with the normal WiFi in your laptop, if you require other network connections.

If a CAT5 connection is not possible then that is fine, it is just something that is worth doing if the connections allow.

Network setups can be complex. If you are having trouble getting thigs to work, please contact us and we will try and help you get things working.