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ESP32 WiFi Superstitions

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Re: ESP32 WiFi Superstitions

#11

Post by venusenvy47 »

zamadatix wrote: post #4

> If your network hardware allows it, you should pin the device to the closest one. In Wi-Fi it's always the client's choice on where to connect to at the end of the day and any hacks the APs try to do to steer clients are "suggestions" at best and "signal ruiners for everyone" at worst. You may be better off specifying which specific AP you want to connect to by specifying the BSSID argument in the WiFi.begin() call…

Do you know of something that could get my Android tablet to switch between two AP's in my house? When I change locations in the house, it will never change to the stronger one if it has even the weakest signal that it was connected to. I can't find any Android app that tells the device to "change to a new AP if it is stronger than the current one".

Re: ESP32 WiFi Superstitions

#12

Post by serviceberry »

Vurdentium wrote: post #6
zamadatix wrote: post #4

> If your network hardware allows it, you should pin the device to the closest one. In Wi-Fi it's always the client's choice on where to connect to at the end of the day and any hacks the APs try to do to steer clients are "suggestions" at best and "signal ruiners for everyone" at worst. You may be better off specifying which specific AP you want to connect to by specifying the BSSID argument in the WiFi.begin() call…

Yes this is a skill issue. But Arduino ecosystem is full of superstition and bizarre hacks. It's cargo cult electronics. They will do anything to avoid reading documentation or writing robust code. Even the power saving recommendation here reeks of it. There is no effort to understand it. Someone on an Arduino forum recommends it, others start to echo it to try to appear like they know what they're talking about, it…

I used to say things like that, but come on: Arduino is targeted at hobbyists. More specifically, it's targeted at hobbyists who don't want to spend too much time learning hardware. If they did, they would be using a "bare" microcontroller better suited for their needs and costing one tenth the price. But they're not interested in microcontroller programming, they just want to get their art project done.

It's the same thing that happened with computers. Billions of people use them, but most just want to access Facebook or use MS Word, not learn OS internals. It's a different world from where we used to be 30-40 years ago, and that's fine. We design simpler, more intuitive products for them.

If a product meant for that group can't be used effectively by the target audience, I think the fault is with the designer, not with the user.

Re: ESP32 WiFi Superstitions

#13

Post by phoronixrly »

venusenvy47 wrote: post #11
zamadatix wrote: post #4

> If your network hardware allows it, you should pin the device to the closest one. In Wi-Fi it's always the client's choice on where to connect to at the end of the day and any hacks the APs try to do to steer clients are "suggestions" at best and "signal ruiners for everyone" at worst. You may be better off specifying which specific AP you want to connect to by specifying the BSSID argument in the WiFi.begin() call…

Do you know of something that could get my Android tablet to switch between two AP's in my house? When I change locations in the house, it will never change to the stronger one if it has even the weakest signal that it was connected to. I can't find any Android app that tells the device to "change to a new AP if it is stronger than the current one".

Yes. The proven method is to A/restrict data rates to just high ones and B/lower the transmit power of your AP so that your devices can no longer maintain high enough data rates after a given point and are forced to disconnect. I am almost certain the run of the mill stock firmware does not offer you this option. Look into installing OpenWrt.

Apart from that, OpenWrt now allows you to install and use usteer which offers a plethora of (802.11 standards-based) tools to manage client roaming from the AP side, including the APs exchanging information between themselves.

Re: ESP32 WiFi Superstitions

#14

Post by Calamityjanitor »

I was having multiple ESP devices from different brands running totally different firmwares all drop out randomly when I switched to a new Asus wifi router.

Came across even more 'work arounds'; No spaces in the SSID, disable IPv6 for the whole network even if the ESP ignores it. Thing is all of these settings would reboot the router and reconnect everything, so it would seemingly work until the next dropout.

I found limiting them to 802.11g instead of connecting with 'n' stopped the dropouts for good. Even now I wouldn't say that is a cure-all and that any of these other recommendations don't work, I'd guess that each AP's firmware might have different conflicts with different devices.

Re: ESP32 WiFi Superstitions

#15

Post by zamadatix »

venusenvy47 wrote: post #11
zamadatix wrote: post #4

> If your network hardware allows it, you should pin the device to the closest one. In Wi-Fi it's always the client's choice on where to connect to at the end of the day and any hacks the APs try to do to steer clients are "suggestions" at best and "signal ruiners for everyone" at worst. You may be better off specifying which specific AP you want to connect to by specifying the BSSID argument in the WiFi.begin() call…

Do you know of something that could get my Android tablet to switch between two AP's in my house? When I change locations in the house, it will never change to the stronger one if it has even the weakest signal that it was connected to. I can't find any Android app that tells the device to "change to a new AP if it is stronger than the current one".

I haven't had an Android device for a number of years now but my guess is "no" from the device side unless you're going to go make your own custom firmware with Wi-Fi settings tweaked or newer Wi-Fi drivers which handle roaming better.

If your router and device support 802.11 k/v/r it can help, most likely the AP does unless it's particularly ancient and Android has supported all of these since 8.0. Ironically, lowering the AP's power can help too (it'll cause the client to see the farther AP as weaker sooner) but obviously that lowers overall coverage at the same time... so it's a tradeoff unless you're willing to deploy more APs to make up for the lower power. Make sure you're restricting advertised rates from your AP to not include the slowest/oldest standards as well. That'll make the client less able to hold on as the connection gets weaker and weaker. Like the power recommendation, this means at the fringes of your coverage you'll get "no connection" rather than "a bad connection" but it'll make the overall airspace healthier.

If nothing else works and you can't fix the client because you lack full control (or a reasonable way to update it) then you can still try falling back to steering clients via hints from the AP (if it supports it) just keep in mind it also may not work and also may cause problems with other devices which were working fine. Or you may get lucky, worth a shot if you've tried everything else first.

As a note: My experience comes from designing and fixing enterprise wireless deployments so if there are any tricks specific to low AP count environments I would be somewhat ignorant of them. The same could be said if there are more easily accessible wireless controls in Android than I am familiar with as, if there are, I still couldn't use them as different guests walk in each day and they all need to work.

Re: ESP32 WiFi Superstitions

#16

Post by toast0 »

serviceberry wrote: post #12
Vurdentium wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes this is a skill issue. But Arduino ecosystem is full of superstition and bizarre hacks. It's cargo cult electronics. They will do anything to avoid reading documentation or writing robust code. Even the power saving recommendation here reeks of it. There is no effort to understand it. Someone on an Arduino forum recommends it, others start to echo it to try to appear like they know what they're talking about, it…

I used to say things like that, but come on: Arduino is targeted at hobbyists. More specifically, it's targeted at hobbyists who don't want to spend too much time learning hardware . If they did, they would be using a "bare" microcontroller better suited for their needs and costing one tenth the price. But they're not interested in microcontroller programming, they just want to get their art project done. It's the sa…

> If they did, they would be using a "bare" microcontroller better suited for their needs and costing one tenth the price.

Where do you get something like an ESP that's one tenth the price? ESPs are cheap and you can run Arduino, ESP-IDF directly, or fringe environments (I had some ESP8266 running NodeMCU because Lua made more sense to me than Arduino).

Re: ESP32 WiFi Superstitions

#17

Post by toast0 »

Vurdentium wrote: post #6
zamadatix wrote: post #4

> If your network hardware allows it, you should pin the device to the closest one. In Wi-Fi it's always the client's choice on where to connect to at the end of the day and any hacks the APs try to do to steer clients are "suggestions" at best and "signal ruiners for everyone" at worst. You may be better off specifying which specific AP you want to connect to by specifying the BSSID argument in the WiFi.begin() call…

Yes this is a skill issue. But Arduino ecosystem is full of superstition and bizarre hacks. It's cargo cult electronics. They will do anything to avoid reading documentation or writing robust code. Even the power saving recommendation here reeks of it. There is no effort to understand it. Someone on an Arduino forum recommends it, others start to echo it to try to appear like they know what they're talking about, it…

> It disables the radio in between AP beacons, so unless there's a bug in the implementation it should have no noticeable impact to a quiet WiFi station other than saving a lot of power.

Seems safe, but it probably depends on the clock being accurate, so it can wake up on time for the next beacon, and the clock frequency is likely sensitive to temperature and therefore power usage.

If you're plugged into a wall wart, chances are the power savings aren't going to be too much; if it helps reliability (which should be easy to confirm), then it's likely worth paying a cent or two more a month. It's different if you're running from battery, though.

Re: ESP32 WiFi Superstitions

#18

Post by Vurdentium »

serviceberry wrote: post #12
Vurdentium wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes this is a skill issue. But Arduino ecosystem is full of superstition and bizarre hacks. It's cargo cult electronics. They will do anything to avoid reading documentation or writing robust code. Even the power saving recommendation here reeks of it. There is no effort to understand it. Someone on an Arduino forum recommends it, others start to echo it to try to appear like they know what they're talking about, it…

I used to say things like that, but come on: Arduino is targeted at hobbyists. More specifically, it's targeted at hobbyists who don't want to spend too much time learning hardware . If they did, they would be using a "bare" microcontroller better suited for their needs and costing one tenth the price. But they're not interested in microcontroller programming, they just want to get their art project done. It's the sa…

The problem isn't with the artist doing a one-off project involving a microcontroller. It's the Arduino "experts" who write blogs, create videos, and dominate forums with their accumulated nonsense. They posit themselves as authorities in the space, newbies adopt and echo whatever rubbish they make up, and the cycle continues. They get very defensive if you try to correct them, even linking directly to documentation supporting it.

If you're going to write a blog about how the ESP32 doesn't connect to the strongest AP so you need to pin it to a specific BSSID in your router settings... Maybe you shouldn't be writing that blog. If you haven't taken at least a moment to check documentation and see that the behaviour you want is already an option that can be selected by changing literally one line in your ESP32's WiFi config. Instead this pseudoscience proliferates.

Re: ESP32 WiFi Superstitions

#19

Post by leptons »

>It seems that when an ESP32 connects it goes straight for the first access point it sees. No matter if that access point is not the one you’ve taped it to. This can lead to bad connectivity, especially since I’ve not really observed ESP32’s moving around to other access points.

This is not a characteristic of "ESP32", this is how the software running on the ESP32 is programmed to work, whatever specific program that is. And it is not my experience at all with "ESP32s". In my ESP-IDF based program, the ESP32 device connects to access points exactly how I tell it to connect with the software I wrote that deals with wifi connections. YMMV.

Re: ESP32 WiFi Superstitions

#20

Post by sieabahlpark »

phoronixrly wrote: post #7
denkmoon wrote: post #2

2.4Ghz WiFi networks should use 20Mhz bands generally. No idea about specifically with ESP32s, but this is good guidance for not congesting the 2.4Ghz space.

I second that. In my experience forcing a 40MHz channel on a 2.4g network leads to abysmal performance (never tried it with ESP32, however I can imagine it would be even worse...).

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