ESP8266 Community Forum

- Thu Jul 02, 2020 3:44 pm #87746 Hi Guys.

I have a strange issue with the ESP8266. Am using the Robotdyn UNO+ESP8266 board, i am using a couple of them. I have programmed them to be used as time counters, they will count how long one of the inputs on the atmega328p has been HIGH and send that time every 20 seconds to the ESP8266 to be displayed on a browser. Every thing works perfect except for the issue below.

The issue.... What happens is that at random times one of the ESP8266 gets disconnected, and to get it back on the WIFI network i have to reboot the ESP8266, it works for a while after the reboot and same thing happens again after some time. It usually takes 4 to 12 hours for this to happen. After trying a few thing i found out that if i leave the ESP8266 untouched when it gets disconnected from the WIFI network and instead reboot the WIFI router, the ESP8266 gets back online like if nothing has happened. Any idea what can cause this ?.

I'm using a D-link DIR-822 router which haven't caused me any kind of connection problems and even while the ESP8266 gets disconnect, everything else works just fine.

Thanks

Marvin V

- Fri Jul 03, 2020 7:09 pm #87757 Hi Marvin,

I've seen similar things. The ESP8266 _can_ be 100% stable when it comes to keeping a connection, but there are caveats.

Primarily, it may actually be your router that's kicking out! All access points are not created equal. It's possible for the router to forget about the client in such a way as the client thinks it's still connected, and the only way for the ESP8266 to know about would be to keep pinging the router and notice that it no longer gets a response.

I have thirty ESP8266-based lightbulbs on an old linksys e2000 router (in order not to exceed the maximum device count on my primary access points) and I saw this very issue.

I solved it by _turning off security_ on that access point, running it completely open. This also greatly sped up the connection speed of those 30 devices when they all come on at the same time. Obviously this required isolating the network another way, so this may not be for you. If so, you may need a new router.


It could also be the power saving mode of the ESP8266 causing issues, but not likely because you mentioned the problem appears after hours, not seconds. In any case power saving is disabled by WiFi.setSleepMode(WIFI_NONE_SLEEP);

Hope this helps.