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By ragemachine
#78791 Hi all,

Never worked with the ESP8266 before or any WiFi in general. I think my project is fairly simple (and lots of examples online), but I have a few specific questions.

Design:
ESP8266 #1: Access point. Attached to a joystick. Read in i2c position (left/right and up/down). Transmit simple packets at maybe 5-10Hz to ESP8266 #2.
ESP8266 #2: Station. Inside RC car. Receive (and echo back) joystick positions. Left/right becomes PWM signal for steering. Up/down becomes PWM to motor for throttle.

The things I don't quite understand have more to do with the fundamentals of WiFi communication, and what behaviors/features are part of the ESP8266 hardware/firmware or maybe even basic Arduino sketches.

Question 1: I intend to use this RC car at an event with hundreds of people in attendance. Should I be worried at all about scanning for/selecting the least crowded WiFi channel/frequency band? Would I be best off just using an Android app on my phone to scan for WiFi channels or is there any easy way to do this in the ESP8266?

Question 2: Is there any way to control antenna gain? Or is it always the same strength?

Question 3: Is there any default 'frquency hopping' type behavior? If the connection is lost on the current WiFi channel, will the ESP8266 AP/station switch to another automatically? Or would I need to find a sketch that performs that sort of action or code one myself?

Question 4: Are there native functions that return WiFi status such as... Ping? Channel? Antenna gain? Or would I need to find or code a sketch to output status for these?

Question 5: How is the connected/disconnect status determined? Is there native behavior between the AP/station where it broadcasts a request and gets a message back? How often is the connection checked?

Thanks for any help.