Vurdentium

Do they deliberately make Rust so difficult to read or is it an unfortunate consequence of its complexity?

Can you tell me if the Pebble can do this...

On my Samsung Galaxy watch, if I get a notification from my Unifi security cameras, for example, I get a little thumbnail image appear on my watch. There's no special app on my watch, just the app on my paired Galaxy phone.

Will it do this? Or would I just get a text notification? I don't understand smart watches well enough to know how much they are doing themselves vs how much of what they do is to be a mindless projection of whatever the paired phone tells them to do.

I'm not sure we're understanding each other so just to be clear, my suggestion is to change from this (pseudo) C:

  wifi_connection_config_t config = {
    .ssid = "my_home_wifi",
    .password = "secret123",
    /*
      implicitly initialised to default:
      .method = CONNECT_TO_THE_FIRST_AP_THAT_RESPONDS,
    */
  }

to

  wifi_connection_config_t config = {
    .ssid = "my_home_wifi",
    .password = "secret123",
    /* explicitly initialise: */
      .method = CONNECT_TO_THE_AP_WITH_THE_STRONGEST_RSSI,
  }

It's that simple.

Deal with what? I would argue that if you're going to the effort of writing a blog post on the topic then you should at least go to the effort of skimming the docs to make sure there isn't already a solution for the common problem you're experiencing.

It's literally one word to change in his WiFi config to get the behaviour he wants. It's already implemented. Who can't "deal" with that?

A) The timing for this is deliberately set to be very conservative in terms of the wakeup window (at the cost of higher power), so the radio is probably powered up for a good 5ms before the beacon arrives. I don't know if you could unintentionally design a 3V3 supply so poor that it takes in the order of milliseconds to adjust to an output current of about 30mA -> 80mA.

B) Yes, this is a fair point, and why I was careful to specify a "quiet" station above. If actively transmitting then there is likely a benefit to disabling power saving, but unlike Arduino bros I will admit at this point that I don't understand the WiFi spec well enough to comment further with any confidence.

The problem isn't with the artist doing a one-off project involving a microcontroller. It's the Arduino "experts" who write blogs, create videos, and dominate forums with their accumulated nonsense. They posit themselves as authorities in the space, newbies adopt and echo whatever rubbish they make up, and the cycle continues. They get very defensive if you try to correct them, even linking directly to documentation supporting it.

If you're going to write a blog about how the ESP32 doesn't connect to the strongest AP so you need to pin it to a specific BSSID in your router settings... Maybe you shouldn't be writing that blog. If you haven't taken at least a moment to check documentation and see that the behaviour you want is already an option that can be selected by changing literally one line in your ESP32's WiFi config. Instead this pseudoscience proliferates.

Yes this is a skill issue.

But Arduino ecosystem is full of superstition and bizarre hacks. It's cargo cult electronics. They will do anything to avoid reading documentation or writing robust code.

Even the power saving recommendation here reeks of it. There is no effort to understand it. Someone on an Arduino forum recommends it, others start to echo it to try to appear like they know what they're talking about, it becomes lore in the Arduino world and you out yourself as a clueless newbie if you don't know to do esp_wifi_set_ps(WIFI_PS_NONE) without questioning anything because that's just the way it's done. It disables the radio in between AP beacons, so unless there's a bug in the implementation it should have no noticeable impact to a quiet WiFi station other than saving a lot of power.