mesh wifi nodes

Hi. I'm Daniel. And I'm Michael. And we built a self-configuring Wi-Fi mesh network around the ESP8266 module and the PIC32 microcontroller. So right now what's going on is that we have one node turned on, this one. You can see that because the LED is blinking. And it's currently searching for an access point to connect to. I'm going to connect my computer to this access point so the LED should continue to blink. And then once my computer's connected, we bring up a GUI. And so because this is just Wi-Fi, you can have a mixed network of the small nodes in your computer. Exactly. So since the computer has Wi-Fi capability, we can connect to the network. What am I looking at there? And so what just happened is that my computer essentially did a handshake with the Wi-Fi module. And they set each other up and established a connection. And you can see that connection here. So my computer is node 83. And the Wi-Fi module is node 225. So they were able to make the handshake and create the edge. OK, so now you're going to ad hoc add another node. Yeah, so we're going to turn on a third node. And the blinking light means here that it's searching. Yeah, that's correct. So right now, both of the nodes are going to search for each other. And what we should see is one of them. OK, so this one found this one. And so you can see it's LED stopped blinking. Now they're going to set each other up, establish the connection. And then in a little bit, we should see that information relayed to our computer. And yep, here it is. So now you can see that there's a connection from my computer to the first node we connected to. And the first node, like we were showing in the LED, connected to the second node, node 202. And now we will bring a third node online. And so this one is a little bit more fun because there's a couple of different access points that it can connect to. And so we're going to see. So you could connect to either computer or? Or so to either of these nodes. Either of those nodes, yeah. Yeah, since it does do it based on distance. But the distance measurement isn't 100% accurate. So it might see it as close enough, I guess. Yeah, it's still searching. And the diagnostic readouts on the? OK, so you can see this one connected to that one. So it's LED stopped blinking. So now they should set each other up. And hopefully, it might take a little bit for the data to propagate all the way over here. Because it has to go through the nodes. Because the data has to be sent from this node to this node, and then from this node to my computer, which takes around five seconds per node. But it looks like it already went through that node. And there it is. So you can see the node that just came online is node 79. And so we have a nice little string of connections. So my computer is connected to the first node, which is connected to the second node. And finally, we're just connected to the last node. OK, very cool. So what happens if you turn a node off? So it should theoretically notice the disconnection and then disconnect it. But because we were having some connection issues earlier, we turned off the disconnection feature for now, just to keep everything so that everything appeared as it should. But we have tested it where it has disconnected and successfully undone the connection, essentially. So you could toss a bunch of these in a room and they'd self-configure. Yep, that's the idea. Very nice.