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I was recently looking into using some ESP32s to use on a BLE hardware project I am working on at the moment. Although I do wonder whether wifi would be a bett
by conradludgate 6y ago
I was recently looking into using some ESP32s to use on a BLE hardware project I am working on at the moment.
Although I do wonder whether wifi would be a better technology to use sometimes. The only thing I remember seeing is that wifi technology uses much more power.
From TFA it looks like WiFi 6 uses less power, is this true?
Anyone experienced have any suggestions whether BLE or WiFi would be better for streaming serial data from a device onto many platforms? (I currently have a BLE demo working, but working with Bluetooth stacks on mobile and desktop are a royal pain, network requests are very straightforward at this point)
- ducktective 6y agoFor equal target transfer rate and range, I don't think there would be a mode that any WiFi tech beats BLE in terms of using less power. If power is your concern, have you considered nRF5 devices? Nordic has a proprietary profile for sending serial data over BLE (NUART) but AFAIK, you could only connect to one device at a time (not many).
- conradludgate 6y agoPower isn't a huge concern, although it's a battery powered device, so having a longer battery life is a plus without needing to include a larger capacity battery. I'll look into the nRF5. I've been using some of Nordic's code to test and build my prototypes already, although I feel like adding a proprietary profile on top will just make it harder to interface. Once I make the connection currently, all I need to do is enable notify on the specific characteristic which isn't too complicated (just a lot of code to actually get the characteristic)
- coupdejarnac 6y agoThis nrf52 demo might be salient: https://youtu.be/tbl6Dui-_w4 https://youtu.be/tbl6Dui-_w4 https://github.com/NordicPlayground/nrf52-ble-multi-link-multi-role https://github.com/NordicPlayground/nrf52-ble-multi-link-mul...
- chabes 6y agoESP-NOW might be suitable, as it requires less power than regular wifi. From the docs: “ESP-NOW is a kind of connectionless Wi-Fi communication protocol that is defined by Espressif. In ESP-NOW, application data is encapsulated in a vendor-specific action frame and then transmitted from one Wi-Fi device to another without connection.” https://docs.espressif.com/projects/esp-idf/en/latest/esp32/api-reference/network/esp_now.html https://docs.espressif.com/projects/esp-idf/en/latest/esp32/... Edit: this video discusses power consumption of esp now: https://youtu.be/6NsBN42B80Q https://youtu.be/6NsBN42B80Q
- chrisco255 6y agoSounds like a security nightmare.
- chabes 6y agoWhat makes you say that?
- sam_bristow 6y agoOne downside of using wifi if that devices like phones really don't like network connections that don't route to the internet. You sometimes have to fight them to stop the phone "helpfully" falling back to 4G or popping up all sorts of warnings about degraded networking to the user. [edit]: This is assuming you are connecting directly to the device of course. Connecting the ESP32 to your existing wifi is well supported and much more reliable.
- pfyra 6y agoI have tried fighting this a couple of times but lost every time. Do you know a solution to make my Android phone keep the connection to a wifi without internet connection?
- sekh60 6y agoI lack a solution but would like to commiserate. We had some config errors on one of our VLANs, where DNS want reachable. The phones helpfully would just say no internet access and then bounce to 4g without any other sorry of error. What I would give to be able to just SSH into all these consumer services and just grep through the logs.
- g_p 6y agoSee https://github.com/leoleozhu/android-captive-portal https://github.com/leoleozhu/android-captive-portal and https://success.tanaza.com/s/article/How-Automatic-Detection-of-Captive-Portal-works https://success.tanaza.com/s/article/How-Automatic-Detection... If you could return valid internal DNS entries for these domains, and serve up a 204 to the right requests, you should be able to stay online. You need to ensure you don't do it for every possible domain - I believe Chrome also tests random non-existent domains too, to ensure it gets back the expected error.
- pfyra 6y agoI have a "captive" or "promiscuous" dns server (it responds with its own IP for all requests) for my esp projects so this info is exactly what I need. Thanks a lot!
- monkendrunky 6y agou may get interested in InnoPhase Inc solution, ultra low power wifi solutions. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCI1JfWpybywnPV_pkAGiGug https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCI1JfWpybywnPV_pkAGiGug