ESP Mesh and ESP Now

[leenowell]

Hi All,

I tried to submit this earlier but not sure what happened.

I was wondering what the relationship is between ESP Mesh and ESP Now. Does ESP Mesh use ESP Now under the covers to do the comms? Reason for the question is that I have some edge devices on ESP8266 and wanted to know whether they would be able to communicate with the mesh to send data to the nodes and ultimately to the router.

I don't suppose there is a way for an ESP8266 to be an active edge node in the mesh is there?

thanks in advance

Lee.

[ESP_LBB]

Hi Lee,

ESP-Mesh and ESP-NOW are two different protocols, however your idea is feasible.

You can refer to this link: https://github.com/espressif/esp-mdf/tr ... kit/button. In this demo,
when the button is powered with USB, it will work as a Mesh device and join the network; but when it's powered with the battery, then it will only send data to the bulbs via ESP-NOW.

So, you can develop your own application with ESP8266 you may already have, and send the data to one of the ESP-Mesh nodes via ESP-NOW, and the cdata will be forwarded to the target node (or server) with ESP-Mesh.

Hope this can be useful to your application.

[leenowell]

Thanks for getting back to me @ESP_LBB

This is essentially what I have running ie ESP8266 sends espnow message to eso32 which is part of a broader esp32 mesh. The problem with this is that the esp8266 not being part of the mesh does not receive any of the mesh control events that t would of it were properly part of the mesh. E.g. router changed channel so therefore the esp8266 will need to change etc. I could code these all manually but seems a lot of work. If the esp8266 could have been part of the mesh (albeit it a leaf node) o was hoping the SDK would manage this.

Thanks

Lee.

[ESP_LBB]

Hi Lee,

For the channel switch trouble, we may have two ways to work around: let the mesh devices broadcast to ESP8266 to switch its channel; or let ESP8266 to switch to other channel to send data after it can't get response. One active way and one passive way.

Another way as you said, is to make ESP8266 support ESP-Mesh. However it's not on the top of the task list for now, hope you can understand.

[leenowell]

Thanks very much @ESP_LBB for getting back to me so quickly. I will go through the mesh event list and see which ones the esp8266 will need to worry about as I assume it will be more than channel switch.

The complexity I have is that the edge device is in deep sleep most of the time as it is battery powered.

Out of interest, older versions of the esp8266 sdk seemed to support mesh but it was removed in later releases. Any idea why?

[ESP_LBB]

Hi Lee,

Yes, we used to develop ESP-Mesh based on ESP8266 before ESP32 officially released, but as ESP8266 is not as powerful as ESP32, and we don't want to limit the user senario for ESP-Mesh, so we moved ESP32 to get better performance.

So in order not to misguide developers to spend too much time to develop ESP-Mesh on ESP8266 and provide better service on ESP32, we decided to remove this part.

[leenowell]

Ah ok thanks very much for clarifying. I have had a look and looks like channel change is the only event needed to propagate to the 8266 unless I have missed something.