ESP8266 Community Forum

I'm working on an IoT project for work and am running into an issue with the security requirements of our IT department. We don't have open access to our wifi, so without a MAC address, you can't connect.

When we opened the network for a short period of time, we could see the device on the network, but it had no mac address. It seems as though, per documentation, that a MAC address needs to be set via AT commands. Is that correct?

According to sparkfun, AT commands don't work until a successful connect to a wifi network though, so that makes it problematic.

I'm programming through the Arduino IDE, so sending even a basic AT command results in nothing.

Long story short, is there a way that I'm missing to get the MAC id? Is there a way to set the MAC ID without being connected to the wifi point?

Thanks!

I may be wrong, but these two statements make no sense to me:

christianmars wrote:It seems as though, per documentation, that a MAC address needs to be set via AT commands
AT commands don't work until a successful connect to a wifi network though

I have never seen anyone setting the MAC address on a ESP (I not saying you cannot do that, however), and I seriously doubt you can connect to a wifi network without a MAC address.

eduperez wrote:I may be wrong, but these two statements make no sense to me:

christianmars wrote:It seems as though, per documentation, that a MAC address needs to be set via AT commands
AT commands don't work until a successful connect to a wifi network though

I have never seen anyone setting the MAC address on a ESP (I not saying you cannot do that, however), and I seriously doubt you can connect to a wifi network without a MAC address.

Yes, exactly my point. The documentation is odd for this shield. Thanks for response. I'll report back when I figure out what the hell is going on here.

Not the ideal solution, but what I have done for these gadgets to get the MAC address is let it connect to my home router (maybe you could just set up a router you could access from a terminal at work?) and let DHCP hand out a IP address - you can then look in the routers tables and it will show what the MAC address was.

mikey