ESP8266 WiFi gateway port for MySensors

[FotoFieber]

@Yveaux
Downloaded the development branch again and used the sketch included as example. The sketch is hanging too. My gut was wrong, AES is not the problem.

[vickey]

Hi.
I am having an issue with my ESP8266 gateway. I have tried all versions of mysensors including developmental versions, but my esp8266 does not show any serial debug, nor it gets connected to my router. I also enabled debug in configuration file. When I install AT firmware, it replies to AT command, it also works with nodemcu firmware, but it does not respond with Arduino firmware. May someone help me?

[Anduril]

Finally I got my NodeMCU and tried the WiFi gateway too. But I get the following messages (with Serial.setDebugOutput(true);):

ESP8266 MySensors Gateway
Connecting to WLAN
scandone
f 0, ....scandone
.add 0
aid 1
pm open phy_2,type:2 0 0
cnt 
..................rm 0
pm close 7 0 0/9299504
..reconnect
f -240, ....scandone
no WLAN found, reconnect after 1s
.reconnect
f 0, ....scandone
.add 0
aid 1
pm open phy_2,type:2 0 0
cnt 
................rm 0
pm close 7 0 0/8288631
..reconnect
f -240, ....scandone
no WLAN found, reconnect after 1s
.reconnect
f 0, ....scandone
.add 0
aid 1
pm open phy_2,type:2 0 0
cnt 
................rm 0
pm close 7 0 0/8124923
..reconnect

Additionally I tried to use

  IPAddress ip(192, 168, 38, 18);  /* Set to whatever IP address you'd like the gateway to have */
  WiFi.config(ip);

to avoid DHCP, but that gives error during compiling:

no matching function for call to 'ESP8266WiFiClass::config(IPAddress&)'

Any hints how to solve?

Thanks

Edit:
to find the problem I tested to connect the ESP to the wifi-hotspot of my smartphone... worked. Is it maybe a problem if the password contain special characters which behave strange during compiling?

[Yveaux]

@Anduril said:

no WLAN found, reconnect after 1s

That's a clear indication the ESP cannot connect to your WiFi accesspoint.
Is the SSID matching your accesspoint ('WLAN')?
Is the encryption supported by the ESP (see e.g. https://nurdspace.nl/ESP8266#Features -- not sure if it is accurate)
Weird characters in the password could be problematic (and of course the password is case-sensitive).

Changing between DHCP/Fixed IP won't make a difference here, as the ESP doesn't even connect. IP configuration starts once connected.

[Anduril]

@Yveaux
SSID is 'WLAN' (all capital). Encryption is WPA2 which should be supported. The password contains '|' (don't know the name, vertical line) and 'ß' (german character). I use them among other more common ones to raise the complexity of the encryption. As I am using a bunch of wifi devices I don't want to go around and change passwords for all if not absolutely necessary. Is there a way to specify these 'weird characters' e.g. by ASCII codes or anything else?

Changing the IP was not to solve this problem but for future use, as my DHCP is not very good. Can you tell me how to fix IP else?

[Yveaux]

@Anduril try to print your password to the serial console and see if it matches the password you entered in the sketch.

[Anduril]

good idea @Yveaux, seems that 'ß' is the problem. serial.print shows ß at that position. Do you know how to avoid that?

[Yveaux]

@Anduril probably Unicode problem of the editor. I assume you use the Arduino editor? Try a simple editor like notepad to type the problematic character, or directly type it in windows by setting your keyboard in numpad mode and type it's ascii code: alt+225

[Anduril]

@Yveaux tried with a nano to print out "ß" to serial, no problems. After that I tried that sketch on ESP:

void setup() {
  Serial.begin(115200);
  const char *pass = "ß1ß";
  Serial.println(" "); //to break line after rubbish at init
  Serial.println(pass);
}

[not readable/copyable stuff]
ß1ß

So in general it should be no problem compiling the char 'ß' even on ESP.. Also in the ESPGateway sketch I don't see anything that is changing the *pass, but maybe you know what is going on with this string in more detail.

edit: it seems to happen even before void setup in the gw sketch. I uncommented everything in setup, loop and output, but still get the distorted serial print of pass.

[Yveaux]

@Anduril I guess it shouldn't make a difference. What happens if you copy/paste the "ß1ß" string from your test sketch into the ESP gateway sketch as password and print that to serial? (make sure to use the same editor on both sketches)

[Anduril]

@Yveaux already tried that. When using my own sketch I get "ß1ß", when using the gw sketch (with really everything commented out, so no functionality) I get "ß1ß". I thought that it might be a problem of UFT encoding, had this issue with transfering LaTeX files created on linux system to windows system and vice versa: the system that creates the file sets the charset.
But I also created a completely new .ino with the gateway-code inside and new created gatewayutil.h with data copied in notepad++, but no succes.
And yes I use Arduino IDE as editor. Is there a good way to use another editor and compile/upload without the IDE?

[Yveaux]

@Anduril I'm still convinced it has something to do with Unicode, but very hard to nail from a distance without the actual files...
Maybe @hek has seen this before?

[hek]

Nope, not the slightest idea.

@Anduril
Couldn't you just temporarily change password on router to rule out other stuff?

[Anduril]

@hek yeah already did this, when leaving out ß it works perfect. So no problem with router or ESP hardware. But changing the wifi password would be the worst case, as I have to reassign that to squeezeboxes, smartphones, laptops, wifi printer,... (and all guest devices of friends/familie) but still possible if all other things fail.
@Yveaux Would it help if I send you the files for verification? Is it possible inside this forum or only via email?

[Anduril]

@Yveaux thank you very much for offering help with verification, but something strange happened during preperation of files: I took an example sketch and modified it to print the "ß1ß" on serial --> working fine.
But after saving the file I tried again, only reading rubbish. Thats strange! So it has something to do with saving the file and maybe setting a special encoding. Maybe thats related to the editor? Could you please try to redo what I explained and see if you get the same results? Thank you. @hek have you ever had such a problem of a sketch behaving differently after saving?

[Yveaux]

@Anduril Ok, did some tests:

Copied your problematic example string from this topic into Arduino IDE (1.6.5), on Windows 10:

Saved the sketch.

Viewed sketch.ino in notepad:

Newlines are f*cked up, but "ß1ß" can clearly be recognized.

Viewed the same sketch in HxD hex viewer:

And there we are! The string is stored as Unicode characters!

Reading it back in Arduino IDE:

Everything looks fine again.

Apparently the unicode string gets compiled directly and shows as multiple, wrong characters in your sketch when used/printed...

Ok, one more idea: you can try to store the ß character as an escaped ASCII character in you string (refer to this ).
This will look strange in the code, but should print correctly to the console:

The ASCII escape sequence for ß is \xE1
Your test sequence "ß1ß" then becomes "\xE11\xE1"

Please try this...

[mkeyno]

@Yveaux
hi
there is problem for sensor library when we intend use the its examples as following
In file included from \libraries\MySensors\MyGateway.cpp:13:0:

\libraries\MySensors\utility/MsTimer2.h:7:2: error: #error MsTimer2 library only works on AVR architecture
#error MsTimer2 library only works on AVR architecture
^
In file included from \libraries\MySensors\MyGateway.cpp:14:0:
\libraries\MySensors\utility/PinChangeInt.h:103:19: fatal error: new.h: No such file or directory
#include <new.h>
^
compilation terminated.
Error compiling.

[Yveaux]

@mkeyno did you change anything to the gateway code, and which version of MySensors are you running?
I've ported the gateway code to ESP8266. That doesn't mean any sensor code will also automatically run on an ESP.
Packaged with MySensors are a lot of libraries that will not compile on ESP, so if you try to use one (pinchange int or timers) it will likely fail to compile.

[Anduril]

@Yveaux SUCCES!!! Thank you very much, your way worked nearly perfect. ONly small change: "ß" is represented by hexcode DF, so using \eDF gives the correct wifi password for me.
Now a last thing as bonus: how to setup a fixed ip and not using dhcp? My dhcp is not very usable as it reassigns all IPs on reboot (stupid firmware by Deutsche Telekom).

[Yveaux]

@Anduril Great to hear you got it to work!

how to setup a fixed ip and not using dhcp?

Google'd a bit. Seems like Wifi.config requires 3 parameters:

    // static ip, gateway, netmask
    WiFi.config(IPAddress(192,168,1,100), IPAddress(192,168,1,1), IPAddress(255,255,255,0));

Make sure to call it after WiFi.begin().

Btw. ESP8266 Arduino port follows the Arduino WiFi library API.