ESP8266 Community Forum

- Sat Dec 20, 2014 7:53 am #5238 Hi.
I'm also interesting about mesh using ESP8266.

Now I use MySensors.org solution with ATmega328p and nRF24L01+ , it's possible make small tree network topology ..
Work good .. but have more not finished bug ..

using ESP8266 have some benefit
1.secure
2.big output power +20db
3.in chip is all .. radio and MCU
4.price
5.if good read then have some power mode for less then 10mA and still is connected to AP ..
..
Yes use ESP8266 in wall switch to control light or small sensor to control temperature is not ideal .. but ESP8266 have SPI then is possible connect another less power used RF chip .. and ESP8266 use as repeater or gateway .. can connected nRF24L01 or CC1101 ..
May be is possible use ESP8266 internal encryption to protect data between nRF24L01 and another sensor.. etc..
chandan2002x write more about your solution pls..
regards.

- Sat Dec 20, 2014 3:35 pm #5265 If you want to rewrite the whole wifi stack, you can implement 802.11s wifi meshing. The hardware will support it, but there is no software for it.

http://open80211s.org/open80211s/

If you don't want to rewrite the wifi stack you can run simultaneous STA/AP and then run the OLSR protocol on top.

Having worked with meshes, I can say that they look far better on paper than in real world deployments. It is very hard to diagnose a misbehaving mesh. It takes expert level skills to identify what is going wrong. For example one mesh I worked with was continuously reconfiguring its routes for no apparent reason. After about a month we figured out that if the two elevators were on the same floor it would block the mesh signal and make it reconfigure.

Hub and spoke wifi with fixed routes is far easier to debug and keep stable.

Where I get my modules

- Sat Dec 20, 2014 4:41 pm #5268 ...hmm... I don't know .. ESP8266 use only as repeater .. in tree topology ..
with +20db is good for this .. for sensor standard 868MHz or 2.4GHz existing solution for example CC1101 or nRF24L01 .. etc ..
and I many time thinking about MESH topology .. real MESH .. need many resources .. and this is high cost .. easy tree network if more easy-cheap and stable ..
I prefer this solution .. is there possible configure as AP and client in same time ??

regards.

- Sun Dec 21, 2014 2:22 am #5288 @dzairo,

......and I many time thinking about MESH topology .. real MESH .. need many resources .. and this is high cost .. easy tree network if more easy-cheap and stable ..

Yes, I am also looking on it and working it. ESP will give a TRUE mesh, where, all nodes are "TRUE Nodes" i.e there will be no distinguishing factors between End-Node or Router or Co-ordinator........any node can be "anything" . And, I am getting the strong ray of hope.

1. Upto 255 client can be connected with ESP (Not 5 as it is by default. Higher device, lower performance... )
2. One client can communicate to any other client with.
3. The ESP can simultaneously be connected to LAN/WLAN and can access other node (esp or PC etc). Any node (connected with ESP-AP) can communicate to any node in LAN (ESP-STA)
4. Multiple ESP can connect each other [As of now manual connection for the issue of default AP-IP of 192.168.4.1....work in progress]. After connection one node can communicate (as of now- simplex........need to implement the routing protocol) to any remote node.

Work update (observer the changes):

1. Upto 255 client/Server (total 255) can be connected from ESP, to ESP or from/to other remote server. I.e ESP can handle total 255 uplink/downlinks.
2. Any client can communicate to any other client with ESP, through ESP (still manual transparent command that can be sent through LAN(putty !), not UART)
3. Every ESP will get unique AP IP, and unique SSID. Its not random, rather static but automatically generated.
4. Any ESP can find all its neighbors having "Specific Series of SSID " (for example "MESH-abcde", "MESH-asdfg" etc). Every ESP will make the priority list as per RSSI (can be updated later with different algo)
5. The ESP will connect the strong RSSI (work in progress...need add more complexity i.e. if connection failure (may be the server ESP is full with 255 client), it must switch to next one in shorting list)


If anybody can inform "How to increase the SSID length broadcast size", it will be great, as of now it is fixed as 10 chars, although it shows the right response in CWSAP?.

Thanks

Last edited by chandan2002x on Fri Dec 26, 2014 2:16 am, edited 1 time in total.