[londons_explore]

Anyone else have reliability issues with the ESP32?

I have a few of them connected to various wifi networks, and after a couple of years they always seem to disconnect and need a power cycle before they'll reconnect.

I understand they might lose the wifi connection, or their DHCP lease, or there might be interference, or something blasts too many packets at them, or a TCP connection hangs or gets RST... But after any of those, I expect them to recover, reconnect, and continue working. However, even a hello world web server on ESP32 seems unable to do that.

However, it's really hard to track down bugs that only happen once a year when I only have ~10 of these devices.

[ahaucnx]

We used a few thousand of the D1 mini (ESP8266) for our air quality monitor kits and had a couple of issues.

On some of them the WiFi would not work at all. Kind of like the onboard antenna was not properly connected. Other died after a few months without any special reason that we were aware of.

Another problem with these boards is that you do not know exactly the specs of the other components. For example we got different rated voltage regulators (5v to 3.3) that caused some issues because sensors we put on the 3.3v did have higher requirements.

Interestingly we had more issues with the "original" ones than the clones. I actually wrote a small blog post about it [1].

Another issue is that it is difficult to get proper ROHS and REACH certifications for these modules. This makes it difficult if you want to use them in a finished and certified product.

All of these issues added up and we made the switch away from the module and now put the ESP32-C3-MINI directly onto the PCBs of our indoor and outdoor air quality monitors. Together with an external hardware watchdog, this seems to pretty much eliminate all issues we had. If you are interested in the shematics, its all open source [2].

[1] https://www.airgradient.com/blog/d1-mimi/

[2] https://www.airgradient.com/open-airgradient/instructions/ov...

[Fnoord]

Mine just doesn't want to connect to WiFi anymore. I'm (or well: was) using this one [1]. Also it feels tricky to update the software, and keep it updated. I'm in the process of switching to a Bresser weather station [2], using SDR to receive the signal and feeding that into Home Assistant.

The other two I'm using (knowingly!) is with Flipper Zero, and they seems very reliable. But I wouldn't define those as traditional WLAN clients.

[1] https://thingpulse.com/product/espaper-plus-kit-wifi-epaper-...

[2] https://www.bresser.de/en/Weather-Time/Weather-Center/BRESSE...

[timonoko]

You dont "expect" anything, you test the connection yourself and restart it when needed:

    if uping.ping('8.8.8.8')[1]==0: machine.reset()

[sokoloff]

I have three running around the house for years and I’ve never noticed one being offline. I just spot-checked them all and all are online.

[doubleg72]

I’ve had a couple Wemos D1 mini for garage door controls and they have just worked without issue for 3 years now.

[ahepp]

You could set up a watchdog of some sort that reboots the system if it can't connect to the internet.