WiFi with ESP8266-arduino

Question

I have a NodeMcu Lua ESP8266 ESP-12E which i want to use to control to a relais via Wifi network.

The first step was to write an Arduino Sketch which scans networks and connects to the network. However, even the standard example from the examples menu didn't work (c.f.,https://github.com/esp8266/Arduino/blob/master/libraries/ESP8266WiFi/examples/WiFiScan/WiFiScan.ino) .

#include "ESP8266WiFi.h"

void setup() {
  Serial.begin(115200);

  // Set WiFi to station mode and disconnect from an AP if it was previously connected
  WiFi.mode(WIFI_STA);
  WiFi.disconnect();
  delay(100);

  Serial.println("Setup done");
}

void loop() {
  Serial.println("scan start");

  // WiFi.scanNetworks will return the number of networks found
  int n = WiFi.scanNetworks();
  Serial.println("scan done");
  if (n == 0)
    Serial.println("no networks found");
  else
  {
    Serial.print(n);
    Serial.println(" networks found");
    for (int i = 0; i < n; ++i)
    {
      Serial.print(WiFi.SSID(i));
      delay(10);
    }
  }
  Serial.println("");

  // Wait a bit before scanning again
  delay(5000);
}

To rule out hardware problems I tried the LUA version from the list API doc (see below), which worked.

 -- print ap list
function listap(t)
      for k,v in pairs(t) do
        print(k.." : "..v)
      end
end

wifi.sta.getap(listap)

Using a firmware build from http://nodemcu.com/index_en.html which worked.

Afterwards, I gave the INO version another try and it seemed to work as well. However, it turned out it only works if the previous firmware has been the firmware from http://nodemcu.com/index_en.html

To I need to include a library or something to properly initialise wifi ? Thanks in advance,

Answer 1

(By googling) I figured out the problem and a work-around. The problem seems to be that the RF module is not properly initialised when the device is powered on or awakes from reset.

Sadly there seems to be no manual mode to switch on the RF module.

However, I found a workaround. First I made the connection to enable deep sleep, for that, we need to tie the RST pin to D0/GPIO 16 on the ESP8266.

Then I added the following code to setup

extern "C" {
  #include "user_interface.h"
}

void setup(){
  if (resetInfo->reason != REASON_DEEP_SLEEP_AWAKE) {

      ESP.deepSleep(10, WAKE_RF_DEFAULT)
  }

Basically whenever the system comes into setup from something else than deep sleep, the system goes to deep sleep and when powering back on the RF module is enabled.