How to switch the WiFi On and Off?

[ullix]

I shot myself in the foot with some "optimization". The ESP32 is quite a power hog, and supplying my Geiger counter modul from the same battery is not helping - it is draining too fast!

WiFi is a candidate for power use. So I ran the setup for hours without any WiFi-communication. This did matter almost nothing. I thought just the fact WiFi is active results in WiFi traffic.

So, I thought that command wifi 0 would be helpful. And a simple reboot would reinstate WiFi. Oh, no. At least after 7x power-off-switching I got back to my code. God bless Tasmota for this option!

But then how can it be done? I'd like to connect an extra button, and pressing it toggles Wifi. Is that possible? If not what is?

[sfromis]

If you do it right, command Wifi should work, but you did not tell what you tried, except that it appears that you simply did not turn on Wifi again.

Still, do not expect to save a lot of power by turning off Wifi, the ESP32 as such is simply not low power, at least without using the ULP feature.

[ullix]

I manually gave command wifi 0 in the console. I expected it would be back after a reboot. No, it wasn't :-(. I guess a tasmota.cmd("wifi 1") command in the autoexec would have worked?

But you say it would not have made much of a difference anyway? Really? Wifi does consume quite some power!

Would ULP work in my case where the geiger counter delivers counts in random intervals, and after 1 sec some processing is due?

[sfromis]

Well, you have to turn Wifi on when you want it to be on again. You do not need a restart. Wifi does only "consume quite some power" in brief blips when sending, not much to merely listen. What consumes power is to have the ESP32 running in normal mode.

ULP can handle what you code in the special programming setup for ULP, which is very different from standard Tasmota operation. I see no reason why it should have trouble counting pulses, but it will occasionally have to wake up the main processor to get data saved persistently or sent.