WiFi as both client and access point

[felipecrs]

Describe your idea

What if our ESP devices could both connect to an Wi-Fi network and also serve an access point for some other device to connect?

This also means expanding the use cases of the existing access point feature, which I think is only useful now for captive portal.

Why is this exciting?

One could call it a repeater. For IoT devices that don't need that much throughput, it would be perfectly suitable. Would help to extend the coverage for other ESP devices, for example.

But my main use case with this is to be able to communicate with devices that use some proprietary mechanism that only works through Wi-Fi. It would enable reverse engineering-based cases where we can "emulate" some server in the "cloud" and intercept the data for local use.

For those devices, it would allow to both prevent it from talking to cloud, and to talk to it locally.

Potential use cases

• Communicate with NEP inverters locally (https://github.com/BlinxFox/nep-gw)
• Communicate with Tuya Wi-Fi door locks locally
• Communicate with other Tuya Wi-Fi-based battery-powered devices that otherwise do not work well with Tuya Local, because they only wake up from time to time to send commands to Tuya cloud

Anything else?

This seems possible:

https://medium.com/engineering-iot/building-a-dual-mode-web-server-with-esp32-ap-and-station-simultaneously-eda403eb1ee4