ESPnow as transport layer
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I've been looking into ESPnow and it looks good to me in many ways. Also the architecture would simplify building sensors.
I'm not a programmer at all, so I have no real idea of the scope of coding & testing this request would require. Or if the protocol could be suited to current topology.
But still, I wanted to throw this out there and hopefully get a response from someone who's better informed. -
@MasMat I won't say I'm better informed, as I just scanned some of the documentation. It seems that ESPnow combines many of the OSI layers. These layers exist for a reason and adnerence to them allows for the extent of the internet.
That said, we don't want our IoT devices to be part of the internet. The low overhead of MySensors communication is required for MySensors to run on Arduinos and inexpensive radios.
Espressif combines theses two at a lower cost. I need to look into it!
I found Getting Started with ESP-NOW (ESP32 with Arduino IDE) It's mesh is limited to 20 devices. MySensors is theoretically limited to 254, but in practice my experience indicates about 30.
I have found the Arduino Nano and the nRF24 very robost, though the tolerances on the radio make it "wabbly" Again, my experience, the ESP8266 is a little fragile (smoked a few) though the radio is awesome.
I have a project I call The Universal Light Switch. My alpha testing is 20 ESP8266 devices Which uses 20 IP addresses on my router. I discovered that my home routers can only handle about 25 WiFi devices. So ESPnow has my attention.
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I never noticed the 20 device cap. That won't do.
What I am thinking of now, is to use EspHome and just dedicate a router to handle just that network - so kinda creating an IoT network without internet access and as standalone as possible. Using static IPs should make the response better too.Thanks for looking into this.
