ESP8266 Community Forum

- Fri Jul 21, 2017 4:05 am #68406 I have a Pic Microcontroller which currently has a Bluetooth module on the USART. This is sending and receiving data to a bespoke app on an Android device as a Bluetooth serial port.
I would like to replace the Bluetooth with Wi-Fi to get better range, but send and receive data the same way.
I've got the ESP wired up and used AT commands on it OK from RealTerm.
I don't understand the basics of Wi-Fi that well, so don't really understand how it would need setting up for this.
Is this possible with this Wi-Fi module ?
How would I connect to the ESP from another device ? (using IP address, MAC address etc !)
Any help, or where to find help would be great.

- Mon Jul 24, 2017 5:25 am #68501 If you are using an HC05 Bluetooth module, the most similar ESP firmware is https://github.com/jeelabs/esp-link

- Tue Jul 25, 2017 11:03 am #68552 Hello!

I went thru' the exact same exercise a few weeks back, and here are my observations.

The main obstacle is your Android app, unless you wrote it yourself.

The pic based product would be as happy to send data over bluetooth, or wifi (there's lua and arduino code for a simple UART to wifi bridge available at http://www.roboremo.com/esp8266-tcp-to-serial.html). Simple enough, serial data in, TCP data over wifi out. And the other way.

Problem is the Android end; your app might expect the data in a different format.

In my case, the project worked beautifully with bluetooth, I created an ESp8266 to be a 'drop-n replacement' for that, confirmed it was doing its job using Blueterm. BUT, the app, if one chose Wifi instead of bluetooth, had a more elaborate preamble protocol.

Of course, if the app you mention is written by you, all the above is irrelevant, as you can make the app read your incoming data over wifi (Either TCP, or UDP) rather than bluetooth.

Regards,

Anand Dhuru

- Mon Jul 31, 2017 5:45 pm #68751 Thanks for the response. It was an Android app I did myself, I'm no expert so struggled with the Streams but got it all working with esp-link. Managed to send bytes to the pic and get the correct response back.
Now I've got it working on my home network need to figure out the remote access thing ? It's all new to me, but keeps me busy !