ESP8266 Community Forum

So i've built a mesh of cheap NodeMCU with ESP8266 inside. Placed all of them around the company to sniff 802.11 and forward all received packets through a 433mhz to a central gateway where packets get analyzed.
This is how a single ESP8266 based sniffer looks like: http://i.imgur.com/x4l3u5E.png
Packet Sniffers are there as we're continuously monitoring security around our office space and we wanted to use ESP8266 as simple, small, iot 'intruders' sensors - however...

The fact that @Espressif is limiting the access to the promiscous mode and so far we're getting only the Beacon packets and yeah, only 128bytes with no payload - is a complete disaster!

Now when it gets to IoT and building 'new things' and testing and being proactive - when things like a full 'promiscous' mode is Limited in any way it is just a step backward. We're all makers here, what motivates people to disable a functionality like this in their chip?

It seems we are not able to do this on a large scale with ESP8266, sorry - we are not able to do this at all with ESP8266.
Does anybody know why promiscous mode is limited? Or knows any alternatives we can use to progress with our project?
thanks in advance.

It seems packet sniffer mode has been extended recently.

But I am totally lost as to why an IoT device would need sniffer mode.

Hi, I am also facing same problem right now.
In my appplicatiion I want to send large amount of data between more than two ESPs.
With promiscous mode: if it is a managemenet frame then packet length is 128 bytes and if it is Data frame then packet length is 60 bytes. So maximum we can able to receive is only 128 bytes without any payload.

Although with the help of this function "wifi_send_pkt_freedom()" we can send much more data but "wifi_set_promiscuous_rx_cb()" only able to receive 128 bytes.

I am using ESP8266 SDK version 1.3.0.
Is their any alternative ways(or functions) are available to receive more data?

As mention above: "packet sniffer mode has been extended recently", so how much packet size is extended? whick SDK i need to use for that?

Thanks you!

How about simply using UDP?