Has anyone actually tried to mesh a large number of ESP8266 chips in practice? I tried it, hooked a 7-seg display to each 8266 and started adding nodes 1 at a t

Has anyone actually tried to mesh a large number of ESP8266 chips in practice? I tried it, hooked a 7-seg display to each 8266 and started adding nodes 1 at a time. Each node would display the number of additional nodes available in the mesh (on the 7-seg). I found the mesh became unstable around 12+ nodes and would auto arrange into 2+ separate meshed networks. This was a while ago and maybe it's more stable today. I'm interested in anyone actually getting 20+ nodes working reliably.