EspNowSkip

Project EspNowSkip
350px
Muziekskipknop op basis van ESP-Now protocol
Status	Initializing
Contact	bertrik, jelly
Last Update	2018-05-06

Introduction

This page is about using the ESP8266/ESP32 ESP-Now protocol in the music skip button.

A music skip button has some tricky requirements:

you want it to react reasonably quickly, with little latency between pressing the button and skipping to the next song
the skip button should be mobile, so it is battery powered and has to conserve power

The ESP-Now protocol is connectionless, you don't need to set up a session/get an ip-address to communicate between nodes.

The hardware is based on ESP8266, they are cheap and ubiquitous.

The sender/slave/skip button is wired such that the actual physical button just wakes up the ESP8266.

The receiver/master is connected to a raspberry pi or similar, receiving packets over ESP-Now, sending received data over serial to the raspberry pi.

I plan to store source code here:

It could work something like this:

there are two roles:
- a single central "master" node
- one or more "slave" skip-buttons
when the skip button is pressed, it wakes up from deep sleep and sends an ESP-Now "SKIP" message to the last known channel and MAC address of the central node
- if the skip button doesn't receive an ACK from the central node, it starts a kind of discovery to re-establish the channel and MAC address of the central node
the central node sets up an AP by name (e.g. "espnow-revspace")
the discovery procedure tries to find the central node by name, this AP name is the only thing that needs to be agreed upon in advance between master and slave code
- from the AP name, the slave node can do a scan to determine the wifi channel and MAC address to use
- the slave node keeps both wifi channel and MAC address in (emulated) EEPROM and goes back to sleep