How to find the best WIFI signal

[agroszer]

Hi,

I have the problem that the house is covered by multiple accesspoints.
Some go away unexpectedly, some come up slowly.
The ESP might connect to a distant one, -80 or less RSSI. That basically just allows to connect and does flaky communication, ping works on and off, usually can't connect with a browser.
MQTT also does not connect, unit load goes to 99.

Looks like doing a unit soft reset reconnects to the very same AP (with crappy RSSI), while the AP near (<40 RSSI) is already up. Hard power cycle seems to fix it (or was it just random?)
Is there any chance to do a WIFI scan and pick the best AP?

(Build: ESP_Easy_mega_20230409_collection_A_ESP8266_4M1M Apr 9 2023)

[TD-er]

Please have a look at the Tools->Advanced page.

Uncheck "Use Last Connected AP from RTC" if you don't want to reconnect to the last used AP.
Check: "Restart WiFi Lost Conn" to shut down WiFi and restart WiFi when trying to make a new connection.
Check: "Force WiFi B/G" to force ESPEasy to only attempt to use 802.11b or 802.11g instead of 802.11n
This does have a bit more headroom in acceptable signal/noise.

You can also play around a bit with the "Max WiFi TX Power", as this may effectively reduce the range of the ESP node and thus limiting the number of access points which can be reached.
However if you set this too low, you may need to move the ESPEasy node or the access point to regain access.
You could add the credentials of the hotspot mode of your phone so in need you can turn on the hotspot on your phone and you can walk to the ESPEasy node.


You can set some value to "Connection Failure Threshold".
This is the number of failed connect attempts (e.g. to the MQTT broker, but any attempt failure is counted) after which ESPEasy will force a reboot.
Can be useful along with the unchecked "Use Last Connected AP from RTC" setting.

[Ath]

(Build: ESP_Easy_mega_20230409_collection_A_ESP8266_4M1M Apr 9 2023)

That build is quite old, looking at the maturity of the WiFi related code (a LOT of work was done since then by TD-er on stability and responsiveness), so updating to the latest release (20231225) will also help here...