ESP8266 Community Forum

- Thu Jul 15, 2021 9:03 pm #91885 Please forgive if this is a duplicate posting (first try did not seem to take or appear in my profile)

Question:
With which radio protocol does the ESP wake up and get to work the fastest? WiFi, BLE, Bluetooth?

Project:
Two radio-linked devices: Device A is a tiny hand-held cube with a single user knob. It sleeps for months on a Coin-Cell. Device B, on a wall adapter, drives a stepper motor that matches Device A's knob rotation angle.

Requirement 1:
With Device A in deep sleep, user twists knob resulting in a stepper move in <30ms.

Requirement 2 :
With Device A awake and in active use, User will rotate the knob wildly, which the stepper must consistently track with latency <20ms.

Assuming my physics, hardware and software designs are best practice, which radio protocol offers the best fit for the above real-time application?

Thank Everyone!

Dan
Campbell

- Sat Jul 17, 2021 8:17 pm #91898 The ESP8266 only has Wifi - doesn't have BLE or any other Bluetooth

- Thu Jul 22, 2021 9:04 pm #91937 Thanks for the info. Oops, I had become aware of that after posting. Can any of the ESP's be configured to use a less burdened protocol, like simple FSK/OOK/ASK?

Thanks,

Dan

- Fri Jul 23, 2021 4:00 am #91939 I don't think you want to go that route, unless you're planning on (mainly) using WiFi for the rest of your project.
The ESP is a microcontroller with WiFi stack and WiFi hardware; in short: that's it's purpose in life.

There are controllers/boards better suited for the simpler jobs, like the Arduino Nano 33 BLE and if you really want to make it "Simple" (depending on your needs), you can take any microcontroller and connect it to any FSK Tx/Rx-board you'd like, for instance, the RFM22B or maybe LoRa is better suited for you?

It really depends on what your goal is, but using an ESP (primarily) for non WiFi related things is in my opinion a bit overkill (like using a Cray for simple maths problems)

But... if the point of your project is, for example, a webserver that once every five minutes want to know the status of an external (low power) sensor using a simple wireless connection, then yes: the ESP should be able to do that.

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