[Solved] Can't find ESP32 WiFi network from Android phone -- works from laptop

Posted by: @will

No, I'm Apple/Mac only.

I know I have a spare iPhone somewhere, but I just moved into a new apartment and haven't finished unpacking yet... At this point I'm considering installing android onto a raspberry pi, to see if by any chance that would work, and also to kill time. 

@leonardo1123 My bet is that your devices are either not on the network your PC is, or you have security software. You mentioned you live in an apartment, if that is so you certainly need a robust firewall and lot's of security to keep your nosy neighbours out. If the PC is Wintel, dl angryipscanner and see what you can find.

@will Yes, me too.

@leonardo1123 I just had a similar wifi issue. I could see the IP on my phone scanner but NOT my mac scanner. After much gnashig of teeth I did the unplug the router and plug it back in. A TON of addresses (192.168.0.x) showed up (I have a moderate size in home network) Just a crazy hunch but try the router unplug, wait a good 30 seconds and plug it back in.

@leonardo1123 Earlier you mentioned that on the PC you saw images but no controls. If that is so, look in the top left corner but 1 should be a person icon, click it and login as admin/admin or admin no pswd. That will give you the camera controls.

Thanks everyone! I'm still a bit stuck on how to be able to do it from my personal phone, but I managed to get it working on an old iPad Mini that I'm shocked I found. 

Next comes a major overhaul of all the code anyway, but first I just wanted to drive around with it!

It's so stuttery though, I'm looking forward to tweaking it. 

@leonardo1123 Good luck.

@leonardo1123

I baled out early because, you are using a product based on an ESP32 (Cam or other).  This forum is for programming and tinkering around with the base components.  Maybe even hacking such a product.  Its fundamental usage should be covered clearly in the manual.  If they did a poor job of doing that for you, you should be reaching out to the seller/manufacturer. 

There are many tens of ways they could have programmed and exposed functionality of the ESP32, not to mention the car.  For us to make assumptions about which way they implemented connections - SoftAP or StationAP or forming those connections would be like throwing darts.  Especially when you mentioned there is an "Ap" for it... it sounds like they have gone to great lengths to make it proprietary.  

For instance - Wyze home video cams uses an app that presents a QR code to the cam to configure the connection.  Wyze also ONLY has apps... They do not permit the use of accessing the camera via a browser.  I don't know what the justification is for that decision.  I only know it wasn't a technical reason!  I've never cracked one open, so I can't speculate what the guts are... it may be an ESP32 for all I know.

If there is someone on this forum that has experience with your product, they should be the ones helping you.  I am not qualified to assume how the company programmed it and I don't plan on reading the manual or reading their code to figure it out.  Personally, I'd rather start from scratch, but then I'm odd that way.  I'm more interested in designing and building it than playing with it as are most people on this forum.

Once you figure it out and want to hack it... I'll be in the thick of it with you. - Good luck.

VBR,

Inq

@inq It appears the esp32-cam is a separate interface from the car. His issue was that his arduino phones would not display the wifi network that the toy was broadcasting, he could get it on his pc but not arduino phones. To be clear, I am no network guy so my words are maybe not techie, but on windows he sees a thing (SSID?) in a list that he selects and something good happens. On his phones he does NOT see that same thing (SSID?) so  can't move forward.

The weird thing is I have similar or identical ESP boards with probably the same software so I was going to try to show him how to direct connect. When I tried my phone ip scanner software saw the ssid, but my mac ip scanner did not. Also a bunch of my 192.168.x.x devices were missing and some that were not connected were on the list. I finally unplugged the router and plugged it back in and everything started working., What I was trying to show him was that in order to get the 'controls' on the camera visible you had to login to the camera.

For some reason I have no clue about I can do that by entering 192.168.0.112 into my browser but he couldn't. Baffles me.

That was the end of my expertise. 

As an aside, is this situation where one device doing an ipscan gets different results from another device doing an ipscan a few feet away a common, known possibility? I thought I was going nuts when I saw it and out of desperation tried the old unplug it and start over. VERY frustrating, am I supposed to know when to unplug and restart? This router has been very reliable, my old unreliable expensive name brand failed multiple times a day so I was constantly re-booting it. It just seems very weird that the better router now has this other problem that completely baffles me because I DON'T constantly re-boot it.

HOW IS IT POSSIBLE TO SEE DIFFERENT ip addresses on an ipscan on two devices on the same network????

Posted by: @zander

As an aside, is this situation where one device doing an ipscan gets different results from another device doing an ipscan a few feet away a common, known possibility?

Your post is very confusing...  You switch back and forth between SSID and IP.  There is SSID scanning and there is IP scanning.  They are two very different things.  Almost all devices trying to connect to a router can do SSID scanning.  I wrote one into InqPortal.  Although I could write an IP scanner, I haven't and I have never needed one, and never looked for one.  I don't doubt that they are available though.   Please identify the type of scanning you are describing again.  

VBR,

Inq

@inq In the case where you quoted me it's ipscan. Don't confuse what I had happening with anything to do with Inq, it is unrelated.

I was simply pointing out that an ipscan or lanscan as it is called in the app on my phone I was using showed address 192.168.0.105 assigned to my ESP32 but another scanner running on my Mac had NO entry at 192.168.0.105 until I powered off and on the router.

The mystery to me is how do two devices 'attached' to the same router have two different address lists? What is really crucial to know is this common, should I schedule a router re-boot nightly?

One thing that caught my eye was the zero in your address.  I had never seen someone actually use this...

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14915188/ip-address-ending-with-zero#:~:text=An%20IP%20address%20ending%20in,addressing%20scheme%2C%20IPs%20from%20192.0.

Do yourself a favor and change you router's DHCP address range... to something normal like 1 or 4 or anything else besides 0.

I got 133 million hits from "ip addresses with zero in it"... none of them good!

Posted by: @inq

One thing that caught my eye was the zero in your address.  I had never seen someone actually use this...

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14915188/ip-address-ending-with-zero#:~:text=An%20IP%20address%20ending%20in,addressing%20scheme%2C%20IPs%20from%20192.0.

Do yourself a favor and change you router's DHCP address range... to something normal like 1 or 4 or anything else besides 0.

I got 133 million hits from "ip addresses with zero in it"... none of them good!

No, don't do that. That's quite normal. The modem from my ISP has an IP address of 192.168.0.1 and anything that connects to it is 192.168.0.xxx.

@inq I wasn't aware I was using 0 but before I rebooted I changed it to what you see in the picture primarily because the kid who runs the free WiFi here and uses 192.168.1.x is one of those half knowledgable people and I wanted to distance myself a bit from him after one day someone was driving my Apple TV. I will probably change it again to something like 192.168.100.100 or 192.168.73.19 to whatever just to appear a little less conspicuous. Only 12 months left here then I don't care for a while. Thanks for noticing.

EDIT forgot picture

@yurkshirelad says no... and the links I read from the Google search said that "modern" equipment should be able to handle it, but older infrastructure might not.  The fact that you got different behavior on one versus the other, seemed odd. 

Now... if Apple in their infinite wisdom says you have to use zero to get some special Apple Magic, that wouldn't be surprising at all.  They are well known for trying to proprietary ham-string you to them.  Just look at the CF that Apple Talk did... and now the EU is about to ban the wire going into your iPhone... Yeah!  They're special.  So was Sony BetaMax.

No corporate network administrator I've been around would set it to zero.