NodeMCU enduser startup issue.

Electronics
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1

NodeMCU enduser startup issue.

Hi, we’ve been working on developing a solution in the UK that uses a nodeMCU board and everything has been going well right up to the point where we sent a unit over to the USA for testing.

The issue is with the enduser startup side of things, in the UK this feature works fine, the device boots and when it cannot connect to a wifi network it goes into the enduser startup mode and broadcasts its access point SSID which is visible.

The two devices (we thought the 1st had become damaged in transport) we sent to the USA both show the same issue, no SSID being broadcast. So it is not possible to connect to the unit and provide the wifi credentials.

Has anyone else had this issue? Or is anyone able to provide some ideas as to why this might be happening?

2

I’m no expert on NodeMCU, but the classic reason for this is that the US wifi range is channel 1-11, and we use 1-13, so the top 2 channels are “invisible” in the US. I cannot see in the docs how it auto-assigns a channel for AP mode, did you set it to higher than 11 in code?

3

Nope we’ve just left it to whatever it defaults to.

4

Hmm, according to the docs, that is channel 6… Soz, that is the easy answer out of the window…

5

So your device is acting as a base station? or ad-hoc?

Someone with a mobile-phone and wifi-analyzer should be able to tell whether it’s active or not.

Does it have a default network it connects to in the UK? If the same name exists in the US, it’s going to try connecting to that… indefinitely?

6

Going to try setting the region to be the UK on the laptop in the states and see if it appears in the list of available networks after that. Good call on the wifi analyser, I will be suggesting they try that too.

The enduser-startup puts the device into an access point mode if it is not able to connecting to a wifi network. This then lets you connect to the device and provide it with the wifi credentials for connecting. Looks like it will remember the last channel it used and stick to that, I have not been able to see how to set a default channel to set.