ESP8266: this thing actually works now!
Posted: Mon Jun 12, 2017 5:19 pm
Thank you @Damien, @pfalcon - you guys have evidently put in some serious work on this.
Last year I attempted a project viewtopic.php?f=16&t=2525, aiming to bring MQTT to the Pyboard via an ESP8266. I never achieved acceptable reliability in the next room from the AP; if I ventured outdoors it was hopeless. After a lot of effort I abandoned it, putting this down to my inexperience with networking. I encountered every possible error condition ranging from ESP8266 crashes to permanently blocking read and write sockets and hangs in the MQTT protocol.
Expecting a frustrating few days I revisited it, adapting it to use uasyncio. The experience is utterly transformed. It's now been running for 6 hours from our shed at the limit of usable WiFi range. My code issues a hardware reset to the ESP8266 in the event of a crash or lockup reporting back when comms are re-established: in the 6 hours this never occurred. I've only seen one ESP8266 crash in countless hours of testing over several days.
I'm still a networking novice but it seems you don't need to be a guru to use it now
Last year I attempted a project viewtopic.php?f=16&t=2525, aiming to bring MQTT to the Pyboard via an ESP8266. I never achieved acceptable reliability in the next room from the AP; if I ventured outdoors it was hopeless. After a lot of effort I abandoned it, putting this down to my inexperience with networking. I encountered every possible error condition ranging from ESP8266 crashes to permanently blocking read and write sockets and hangs in the MQTT protocol.
Expecting a frustrating few days I revisited it, adapting it to use uasyncio. The experience is utterly transformed. It's now been running for 6 hours from our shed at the limit of usable WiFi range. My code issues a hardware reset to the ESP8266 in the event of a crash or lockup reporting back when comms are re-established: in the 6 hours this never occurred. I've only seen one ESP8266 crash in countless hours of testing over several days.
I'm still a networking novice but it seems you don't need to be a guru to use it now