Unable to use phone to connect node to its hotspot

[mitra42]

Thanks for the library - super useful and saved a bunch of time for us.

I'd like to test devices with a hotspot.

But. .... if the device comes up with the portal, and I connect to it from the phone,
Then the phone's hotspot isn't shown (because the phone turns it off when connecting to the node's).

I've then tried accessing the node form my laptop - that's problematic - I couldn't get it to work at all in Firefox (requires https) or Safari (redirected to www.192.168.4.1 !), but it worked in Chrome. But this showed another problem - that the rescan process is faster than the default broadcast frequency of my iPhone, so I had to hit "Rescan" multiple times before it randomly saw the phone.

After that the device worked fine - but its too hit or miss to use in the field.

I don't have any great solutions - just flagging it as a problem.
(p.s. the project we are using it on is FrugalIoT and the code is in system_wifi.cpp where we have a watchdog on the portal, so it occasionally retries to connect to a known WIFi. )

[Juerd]

Using a phone's hotspot is an interesting chicken-and-egg problem if you don't have a second phone to configure the ESP. The way Firefox and Safari apparently behave isn't helping either.

If you're configuring devices in bulk, it may be easier to pre-fill the configuration files in the SPI filesystem using esptool.py.

[mitra42]

My application, would be someone in the field, trying to use their phone to connect a device to the net (possibly temporarily, e.g. to upload stored sensor readings). So there is only one WiFi point in the space (the user's phone) and no way (and probably a bad idea) to reflash the device to point at the phone.

I like the idea of preconfiguring, but that does presume you know the SSID of the phone before going into the field.

I'm imagining multiple people physically hiking out to remote, unconnected devices, that have been collecting data, and using their phone to connect, upload, and possibly analyse that data. It might be different people each time.

Note .... I'm trying to think thru different possible scenarios for device usage without knowing ahead of time how all people will use devices.

My own personal scenario - where I hit the problem - was trying to demo where the only net-connectd device was my phone. I solved it as this time I happened to have a laptop (which is how I hit the Firefox & Safari issues) but won't necessarily have a laptop next time I want to do a demo.

[Juerd]

The only solution I can think of, is to allow manual entry of the SSID. But that leads to a can of worms regarding my preference for a KISS user interface... I have to think about this.

[mitra42]

Yes -that was what I was thinking - it could be a config option to add a blank (like on my laptop, I can choose "Other" and enter a SSID/PW that doesn't show up in the SSID scan)

Also ... probably worth making the scan take longer, another problem i hit was that when trying to connect to the phone's SSID I had to hit Rescan a random number of times till it shows up, I'm guessing that phones (or maybe just iPhones) don't broadcast their SSID as often. (I hadn't yet posted an issue as was planning to experiment first)