ESPNow half broken on ESP8266 (1MB) ??

[osodrac-lab]

Hi all, first kudos to the MP team for an amazing project !

I am building a weather station using ESPNow for data exchange between

• an ESP32-C6 board running Micropython v1.27 with 2MB flash and
• an ESP8266 board running Micropython v1.28 with 1MB flash.

I can send data in the ESP8266 --> ESP32 direction
but not in the other direction : on the ESP32 board,
the call e.send(peer, data, sync) returns immediately
with value False and the other side (ESP8266) waits forever in e.recv().

I am using verbatim the sample code at the top of the doc page
https://docs.micropython.org/en/v1.28.0/library/espnow.html#introduction
which runs flawlessly at first try in one direction, but NOT in the other.

I have triple-checked (for some large value of 3) the MAC addresses
and the radio channels (but remember it works in one direction).

Maybe it is due to the fact that the ESP8266 board having
only 1MB flash, is running a stripped down espnow module :
dir(espnow) shows a reduced set of functions.

Is this a known problem with ESPNow on ESP8266/1MB ?
I checked https://github.com/orgs/micropython/discussions
without success.

Thanks !

Board refs:
ESP8266 : https://en.01studio.cc/micropython/pyWiFi-ESP8266/pyWiFi-ESP8266.html
ESP32 : https://www.dfrobot.com/product-2771.html

[peterhinch]

Perhaps worth studying this doc, in particular the section on power saving modes which talks about reception problems.

[osodrac-lab]

I had read that part of the manual but it has been of little guidance in my case.
Still, following your suggestion, I have tried to add a sta.config(pm=sta.PM_NONE)
just before sta.disconnect() but to no avail....
I wish the send() function would return more info than just False when it fails.

Thanks for your feedback!