ESP8266 Community Forum

Hi!

This is my first post. I have been trying a school project involving Texas Instruments Tiva C and 3 Olimex wifi ESP8266 modules (https://www.olimex.com/Products/IoT/MOD-WIFI-ESP8266-DEV/open-source-hardware). Like it could be guesses, I'm trying to set some basic communication between them. Basically, I would just need the RSSI values measured by the wifi modules of an external wifi-source which are then sent to the micro-controller.
For a few days now, I'm wondering about the firmware. I have been playing with the AT commands but I have the feeling that's not going to work with them. I have seen around the net that you can upload different firmwares e.g., AT commands, lua-type, etc.. But which one should I choose? I have been thinking of writing my own firmware but the documentation about the Olimex module or Espressif ESP8266 are not so great. Is there anywhere a full listing of the libraries, functions, I/O, etc.. available? Thank you all in advance!

Hi John, welcome to ESP8266 Land
For a quick and relatively painless intro. I'd always suggest trying the nodemcu/LUA framework first.
The firmware is straigthforward to flash and a lightweight IDE with lots of links to the stuff you need is here:
https://github.com/4refr0nt/ESPlorer
One of the links on GitHub will bring you back to the ESPlorer thread on these forums where there's plenty of help on setting up and flashing new firmware.

Once set up, the nodemcu docs have nice concise examples. In particular one call will get you the stats of all the AP's in range as documented here:
http://nodemcu-firmware.readthedocs.org/en/dev/en/modules/wifi/#wifistagetap

Thank you and thank you also for the tips! I installed the NodeMCU firmware v.0.9.6. Do you know how fast the RSSI can be acquired? Because it seems that it takes about 2s to get a value.