ESP8266 Community Forum

Noob about low power techniques.

I've written plenty of projects to do sensors and hosting webpages to show those values. I can do it for soft and station. I think I understand this pretty well.

I've never done anything using the various sleep modes. From reading about low power techniques, we do our readings, then turn off the ESP8266 for some duration... rinse and repeat. I would like to expose the sensor readings through a softAPConfig web page using the above techniques. I want to connect directly from a phone looking for the WiFi SSID.

I want to say... every couple of seconds (time enough so a phone doesn't give up) check for any incoming connection? If there is one, allow the connection and stay running as long as is necessary (seconds, minutes hours) to fulfil the phones requests. If no phone is trying to connect, go to sleep until another couple of seconds.

Is it possible and/or practical? Can I save a large percentage of power requirements especially if nothing is trying to connect? What keywords should I use to research this?

Thanks

This won't work as you will need to keep the radio switched on and transmitting as an AP for your phone to even detect it.

Low power modes work best when the ESP is a Wifi client not an AP - I would look at setting up a server that the ESP can publish results to periodically, either a local machine or something cloud based. You could even use a Raspberry Pi as the server.

Thank you. That's pretty much what I expected, but was hoping someone might know some slick alternative.