5 ms·

For those unfamiliar with the topic, these two chips are by and far the most common wifi chips for DIY and are also very common in IoT devices. Due to cheap pri

For those unfamiliar with the topic, these two chips are by and far the most common wifi chips for DIY and are also very common in IoT devices. Due to cheap price ($2—$5 depending on the model) and very low barrier to entry technically, these devices are both very popular as well as very wide spread in those two categories. These chips are the first hits for searches such as "Arduino wifi module", "breadboard wifi", "IoT wifi module", and many, many more as they're the downright easiest way to add wifi to something that doesn't have it out of the box. I'm not sure how applicable these attack vectors are in the real world, but they affect a very large number of devices for sure.

Klathmon 7y ago
They are also really capable processors on their own with some nice I/O, and they can be integrated to be really low power so things can run on battery power for months to years.
- dleslie 7y ago
  For example: the ODROID Go is ESP32 based and emulates all major 8-bit platforms reasonably well; it's a niche favourite.
- fyfy18 7y ago
  Can they really last that long (on their own)? I looked into this when the ESP8266 first became popular maybe 4 years ago as I wanted to build WiFi temperature and humidity sensors. My calculations were that a set of AAA rechargable batteries (~2000mAh) would last a few days at most, with the device in deep sleep most of the time and waking up every 10 mins to take a reading and send it over WiFi. Right now I'm looking to create smart blinds. The motors don't use that much power, but the issue is the MCU listening for commands. The ESP32 support BLE, but it's power consumption is still rather high, so batteries would only last a few days at most.
  - Klathmon 7y ago
    Yeah, although it's a bit more involved than just getting any NodeMCU board. A bare chip makes it much easier, and you need to balance what comes online and how long it sleeps to still work in your use case. It's not all that easy in some cases, but it can be done. I've used [1] as a resource before in my own projects. [1] https://github.com/z2amiller/sensorboard/blob/master/PowerSaving.md https://github.com/z2amiller/sensorboard/blob/master/PowerSa...
  - Gibbon1 7y ago
    Not totally sure about the ESP8266. I used a WiFly RN131 in a sensor product that woke up every 15 minutes and sent a reading. AA batteries lasted probably 18 months. Biggest problem we found was enterprise networks would randomly kick you off if you were using DHCP. I think because they would assume that if you hadn't transmitted in five to ten minutes it meant you'd gone away. Using static IP fixed that. Edit: Friend of mine that mucks with ESP8266's uses the low power timer to reset and wake the device up out of deep sleep. (Via a simple hack I think just connecting a timer pin to the reset).
  - nielu 7y ago
    I was able to power ESP-12E based humidity and temperature sensor for about 6 months from 18650 cell. I've used deep sleep and 15 minutes intervals between readings.
  - Tempest1981 7y ago
    Here's a cool project for farm telemetry: http://www.geekstips.com/two-esp8266-communication-talk-each-other/ http://www.geekstips.com/two-esp8266-communication-talk-each... Star-mesh topology, with batteries on the leaf nodes. Solar further in. Excerpt: "I’m expecting about 3 months at a 5min log interval using a 2000mAh lipo battery."
  - zaarn 7y ago
    Personal experience: I have a ESP32 that runs as a sort of weather station. It has a ~2000mAh battery and lasts almost 2 months, getting a data point once every 30 minutes. That is using the ESPHome to program it. Even at once every 10 minutes, it should manage almost 3 weeks without requiring a recharge. Some options that definitely help is to quicken the Wifi reconnect. ESPHome has options to disable AP scanning and doing a fast-and-dirty connect&send. Using MQTT also helped a lot compared to using HTTP. The most important part is to reduce the on-time as much as possible. 30 seconds is still way above the lower limit that I can do. If you halve it you can double the amount of data points without additional energy by reducing the sleep time. I'm working on replacing the battery with a solar panel and supercap to power it from ambient shadow light entirely, the numbers to agree that it is possible in my case. Would help to keep it alive in cold weather.
baybal2 7y ago
I'd say Espressif has a near monopoly due to first comer advantage. There are way, way more moneyed companies in the wifi MCU game, but I have not seen a single competitor chip outside sales demos yet. Redpine had big dotcoms backing, but it seems that even they dropped the ball on them in favour of Chinese chipmakers. Amazon and Google recently reached out for MXCHIP and Espressif, and their Redpine based solutions never went beyond the tech demo stage.
- solarkraft 7y ago
  Realtek has the RTL8710, which is a lot like the ESP8266 but with an ARM Cortex-M3 (while Espressif uses the rather obscure Xtensa architecture), which has the advantage of getting an LLVM toolchain for it, which means you can program it in Rust (while the ESPs are mostly limited to C). The real advantage of the ESP8266 however is its raw popularity. It has an Arduino environment, tons of ready to run sketches, Basic, Javascript, Lua and Python interpreter environments and lots of interesting projects already done with it. The ESP32 follows right in its foot steps with even more features, power and power saving features. Espressif really saw the market the DIY community means and did some minor tweaks to its policies to cater to it, which probably helped its popularity with commercial hardware makers as well.
  - baybal2 7y ago
    I heard of Realtek,and took a look at it. It still comes with fever RF accessories on package, and thus grows your BOM. And their wireless docs and SDK as a whole are kind of obscure/"Taiwan style" Plus, since it comes from "another China" it's subject to Chinese customs duty which negates whatever cost advantage it could have.
  - MrBuddyCasino 7y ago
    There is now a branch of LLVM that supports XTensa. You can run Rust code on an ESP, but it’s awkward.
    - monocasa 7y ago
      mrustc is a good option too.
sixothree 7y ago
I have a bunch of these around the house and garage. I never would have expected them to be secure against an attack.
spyder 7y ago
Yep. Just looking at one commercial product that's using it, the Sonoff wifi switch was bought by a lot of people: on Banggood they show that they sold 242338 of them: https://www.banggood.com/SONOFF-Basic-10A-2200W-WIFI-Wireless-Smart-Switch-Remote-Control-Socket-APP-Timer-p-1019971.html https://www.banggood.com/SONOFF-Basic-10A-2200W-WIFI-Wireles... on Amazon the 4 pack listing has 548 customer reviews and there are other listings with hundreds of reviews and probably lot more people bought it than the reviews. https://www.amazon.com/Sonoff-Remote-Control-Compatible-Android/dp/B078GDFYTY?th=1 https://www.amazon.com/Sonoff-Remote-Control-Compatible-Andr... It's used mostly for lights, fan, AC, heating, so not that much critical, but still lot of devices.

Klathmon 7y ago

They are also really capable processors on their own with some nice I/O, and they can be integrated to be really low power so things can run on battery power for months to years.

dleslie 7y ago
For example: the ODROID Go is ESP32 based and emulates all major 8-bit platforms reasonably well; it's a niche favourite.
fyfy18 7y ago
Can they really last that long (on their own)? I looked into this when the ESP8266 first became popular maybe 4 years ago as I wanted to build WiFi temperature and humidity sensors. My calculations were that a set of AAA rechargable batteries (~2000mAh) would last a few days at most, with the device in deep sleep most of the time and waking up every 10 mins to take a reading and send it over WiFi. Right now I'm looking to create smart blinds. The motors don't use that much power, but the issue is the MCU listening for commands. The ESP32 support BLE, but it's power consumption is still rather high, so batteries would only last a few days at most.
- Klathmon 7y ago
  Yeah, although it's a bit more involved than just getting any NodeMCU board. A bare chip makes it much easier, and you need to balance what comes online and how long it sleeps to still work in your use case. It's not all that easy in some cases, but it can be done. I've used [1] as a resource before in my own projects. [1] https://github.com/z2amiller/sensorboard/blob/master/PowerSaving.md https://github.com/z2amiller/sensorboard/blob/master/PowerSa...
- Gibbon1 7y ago
  Not totally sure about the ESP8266. I used a WiFly RN131 in a sensor product that woke up every 15 minutes and sent a reading. AA batteries lasted probably 18 months. Biggest problem we found was enterprise networks would randomly kick you off if you were using DHCP. I think because they would assume that if you hadn't transmitted in five to ten minutes it meant you'd gone away. Using static IP fixed that. Edit: Friend of mine that mucks with ESP8266's uses the low power timer to reset and wake the device up out of deep sleep. (Via a simple hack I think just connecting a timer pin to the reset).
- nielu 7y ago
  I was able to power ESP-12E based humidity and temperature sensor for about 6 months from 18650 cell. I've used deep sleep and 15 minutes intervals between readings.
- Tempest1981 7y ago
  Here's a cool project for farm telemetry: http://www.geekstips.com/two-esp8266-communication-talk-each-other/ http://www.geekstips.com/two-esp8266-communication-talk-each... Star-mesh topology, with batteries on the leaf nodes. Solar further in. Excerpt: "I’m expecting about 3 months at a 5min log interval using a 2000mAh lipo battery."
- zaarn 7y ago
  Personal experience: I have a ESP32 that runs as a sort of weather station. It has a ~2000mAh battery and lasts almost 2 months, getting a data point once every 30 minutes. That is using the ESPHome to program it. Even at once every 10 minutes, it should manage almost 3 weeks without requiring a recharge. Some options that definitely help is to quicken the Wifi reconnect. ESPHome has options to disable AP scanning and doing a fast-and-dirty connect&send. Using MQTT also helped a lot compared to using HTTP. The most important part is to reduce the on-time as much as possible. 30 seconds is still way above the lower limit that I can do. If you halve it you can double the amount of data points without additional energy by reducing the sleep time. I'm working on replacing the battery with a solar panel and supercap to power it from ambient shadow light entirely, the numbers to agree that it is possible in my case. Would help to keep it alive in cold weather.

baybal2 7y ago

I'd say Espressif has a near monopoly due to first comer advantage. There are way, way more moneyed companies in the wifi MCU game, but I have not seen a single competitor chip outside sales demos yet. Redpine had big dotcoms backing, but it seems that even they dropped the ball on them in favour of Chinese chipmakers. Amazon and Google recently reached out for MXCHIP and Espressif, and their Redpine based solutions never went beyond the tech demo stage.

solarkraft 7y ago
Realtek has the RTL8710, which is a lot like the ESP8266 but with an ARM Cortex-M3 (while Espressif uses the rather obscure Xtensa architecture), which has the advantage of getting an LLVM toolchain for it, which means you can program it in Rust (while the ESPs are mostly limited to C). The real advantage of the ESP8266 however is its raw popularity. It has an Arduino environment, tons of ready to run sketches, Basic, Javascript, Lua and Python interpreter environments and lots of interesting projects already done with it. The ESP32 follows right in its foot steps with even more features, power and power saving features. Espressif really saw the market the DIY community means and did some minor tweaks to its policies to cater to it, which probably helped its popularity with commercial hardware makers as well.
- baybal2 7y ago
  I heard of Realtek,and took a look at it. It still comes with fever RF accessories on package, and thus grows your BOM. And their wireless docs and SDK as a whole are kind of obscure/"Taiwan style" Plus, since it comes from "another China" it's subject to Chinese customs duty which negates whatever cost advantage it could have.
- MrBuddyCasino 7y ago
  There is now a branch of LLVM that supports XTensa. You can run Rust code on an ESP, but it’s awkward.
  - monocasa 7y ago
    mrustc is a good option too.

sixothree 7y ago

I have a bunch of these around the house and garage. I never would have expected them to be secure against an attack.

spyder 7y ago

Yep. Just looking at one commercial product that's using it, the Sonoff wifi switch was bought by a lot of people: on Banggood they show that they sold 242338 of them: https://www.banggood.com/SONOFF-Basic-10A-2200W-WIFI-Wireless-Smart-Switch-Remote-Control-Socket-APP-Timer-p-1019971.html https://www.banggood.com/SONOFF-Basic-10A-2200W-WIFI-Wireles... on Amazon the 4 pack listing has 548 customer reviews and there are other listings with hundreds of reviews and probably lot more people bought it than the reviews. https://www.amazon.com/Sonoff-Remote-Control-Compatible-Android/dp/B078GDFYTY?th=1 https://www.amazon.com/Sonoff-Remote-Control-Compatible-Andr... It's used mostly for lights, fan, AC, heating, so not that much critical, but still lot of devices.