• I looked through the various libraries linked off the wiki page. What strikes me is that other than the particle.io one none handle the fact that wifi can come up automatically at power-up. They all seem to think that the JS code needs to drive the wifi activity when I think that that's not a good idea for several reasons.

    The first is power. In the case of the esp8266 the SDK can initiate a connection before Espruino even starts to run. Depending on the state is was in (e.g. sleep) it shouldn't have to get a fresh association.

    The second is that things do get complicated quickly. For example, do you really want the logic to handle state transitions and to retry to connect if the AP is lost in JS? That quickly adds up to quite some code.

    Or if power-save sleep results is the loss of a connection, do you want to code the logic to receive a callback and then reconnect in JS?

    I would much prefer an interface that prescribes the desired state and that lets some lower device dependent code make it happen and "keep it so" even through restarts. So instead of "connect" I would prefer a "station" call that makes Espruino a station on the specified network (the params are mostly the same). Similarly an "access_point" call that makes Espruino an AP.

    How is that different? The "station" call might take some parameters to control how aggressively to reconnect when the AP is lost but the biggest difference is in the semantics. In one case the effect of a call is persistent, in the other it's not.

    Maybe this can be implemented in layers so a lower layer with the primitives is available as well, but that does add code and complexity.

About

Avatar for tve @tve started