Craigbear wrote:hi
i have been running 10 esp8266 mini for awhile now.
im thinking of setting up a new project..
i want to have 1 esp8266 mini running as a master and 10 eps01 as slaves so only one ip number is used..
has this been attempted before.
tips and links are very welcome..
pictures to follow also
There are several solutions to this. The right choice would be dependent on what you're trying to achieve with the Master/Slave architecture. I have a router or two that limited to less than 10 connections. If it is
just to avoid using your router IP connections, Mesh is a very good choice. It is also a good choice if you have significant distances between nodes... say a bunch of smart devices in your houses.
Another use case might be you need them to work together in a more real-time scenario. Mesh has some latencies that might cause troubles. Long time ago, I did a project where I was using the sniffer routines of the ESP8266. You can't use the sniffing routines at the same time as standard WiFi networking, say to host a website server giving access to browser clients. I ended up writing communications through SPI pins from the sniffing WeMos to a the second WeMos hosting the web server. I just clipped all the pins on the the slave WeMos except the SPI, 3.3V and Ground and stacked them. There is no reason, you couldn't do multiple slaves like that. I'm working on a robot project where I will be doing just that. The SPI would talk to all the slave ESP8266 units that might handle a specific limb or a set of sensors.
You could also do your own ESP network using I2C or even Serial.
Would be interested if you want to share more details about your project.
VBR,
Inq