ESPNOW is broken



  • Hi,
    I'm using ESPNow for a professional project since 6 month. It has been quite difficult to use because of its weak implementation in UIFlow. Data lags, connexion loss, duplex not working well and, the worst, the need to use a wifi hotspot (wifi router) to boot the M5StickC & M5Core (blocked on black screen if no wifi around), which defeat most of the interest of this protocol.
    But, after all, it was working one way, quite reliably with a router around.
    2 days ago, working on the project again after 2 month of work on others, I discovered that ESPNow have been completely rebuilt in UIFlow. And that it completely broke the work of my project (a quite costy and important for the company am working for)...
    0_1666364946184_Capture d’écran 2022-10-21 à 17.08.29.png
    I didn't find any explanation about that anywhere in the community or wiki (but maybe somebody could tell me where to find some). Then I tried using the new ESPNow examples in UIFlow : Master & Slave (the manual haven't be updated sadly). And no success. Error everywhere in the examples. Black screen. These examples haven't been tested it seems.
    0_1666365065679_Capture d’écran 2022-10-21 à 17.10.45.png

    My question is : how could I manage to make this project working again with ESPNow new implementation in UIFlow ? Did somebody succeed to use it again ? And more, are M5Stack engineers aware of this problem ? Are they / you working on it at the moment ? With the lack of documentation and working examples, it cost me a lot of time and maybe for nothing.



  • Have you checked the Micropython.org website to see what they say (UIFLow is built on micropython)

    Can you use ESPNow (in micropython ) without the UIFlow side?



  • @starcrouz Hi, I too had an ESPNOW fully operational application completely stop working (communicating) about two months ago.
    It is programmed in Arduino IDE, using C, C++. I had just updated libraries and made a small change and after re-uploading the sketch, it stopped communicating.
    Here is my ESP_NOW tutorial on GitHub:
    https://github.com/teastainGit/ESP_NOWpeer2peer
    It is Arduino IDE, not UIFlow.
    I went over my code line by line and found a small error that was acceptable two months ago...but not anymore.
    So this means that they changed ESP_NOW on us!
    Hope this helps, Terry



  • Hi ajb2k3 & teastain,
    thanks a lot for your advices.
    I will look at micropython side but I'm very concerned by the fact that the UIFlow blocks I used have been deprecated without notice. I'm on a very bug hurry now.
    I went back to V1.9.8 firmware on my M5StickCPlus and M5Core and everything is working again now. At least temporarily.
    Have a good week