ESP8266 Community Forum

- Wed Jan 24, 2018 7:08 am #73451 hi
What is the diffrence (advantage disavantage) between WIFI_AP and WiFi.softAP ?

thanks

- Wed Jan 24, 2018 11:23 am #73462 AFAIK the ESP has the modes STA (station), AP (access point) and STA + AP (dual mode).

Since the ESP only has hardware for only one channel/mode, I can imagine that STA + AP uses software for the AP-mode (hence the name "SoftAP"), whilst in the other modes only hardware is used (as either STA or AP).
If my assumption is correct, STA- or AP-mode alone would be fastest/most efficient.

So if you need both modes at the same time, you'll have to accept a little bit speed/efficiency decrease.

But... I'm only guessing here.

Assumption is the mother of all f*ckups. At least: that's what I'm assuming.

- Wed Jan 24, 2018 12:52 pm #73464

AFAIK the ESP has the modes STA (station), AP (access point) and STA + AP (dual mode).

Since the ESP only has hardware for only one channel/mode, I can imagine that STA + AP uses software for the AP-mode (hence the name "SoftAP"), whilst in the other modes only hardware is used (as either STA or AP).
If my assumption is correct, STA- or AP-mode alone would be fastest/most efficient.

So if you need both modes at the same time, you'll have to accept a little bit speed/efficiency decrease.

But... I'm only guessing here.

Just a side comment, I have read on the Espressif forums that if you use the combined STA+AP mode then you can periodically lose connection on the STA side when the AP goes into RF Scanning mode to check for interference levels on adjacent channels (this issue: https://github.com/esp8266/Arduino/issues/1615). For this reason I too would recommend using the dedicated STA or AP modes. In fact I'm not sure when I might need a combined STA+AP mode at all, but I'm sure there must be a reason that it exists...?