Wifi connection for WebUI

[sandmix]

Hi,
I would like say that this project is greate.
Are there any plans to make connection to ESP awailable through wifi. Mainly to be able to output to smart tv web browser.
Thanks.

[Abasz]

Thanks for your interest.

In the past ESPRM supported WiFi via web-socket by running a HTTP server on the MCU (also allowing serving the GUI from the board it self). But this had several limitations and issues. Certain features were blocked due to the lack of SSL connection. It is not possible to run proper HTTPS server on the MCU (I experimented with this, it does not have enough RAM), boards are just not powerful enough and without secure connection the distribution (updating for instance) is a nightmare.

So that feature has been deprecated and the project was moved to a direction where connection is BLE only, and the Web Bluetooth API is used. This also means that if your smart TV browser supports this API it should, I suppose, be able to connect via BLE.

Nevertheless, if you go back to version 5.2 you can still compile the project to use web socket (I dont recommend this though) and if you build the official GUI with the version supporting web socket you can still use it that way (e.g. serving it from the MCU or from an other local server on your network). Also I kept the related docs under

Though this means that you may loose some things, but from the rowing engines perspective these are not deal breaking but considerable.

On the other hand, Samsung Smart TV's Tinzen browser (as of 6.2) should theoretically have Web Bluetooth capabilities but I was not able to test this as I have only an old one with a browser version that does not support this feature. I suppose there are other smart TV-s that would have a chromium (or something similar) based browser in TV that supports Web Bluetooth API.

There is an official GUI that allows connection via Web Bluetooth API
(project page)

Otherwise you could cast your phone/tablet/mac/pc to the smart TV in e.g. full screen mode. Its might no ideal I suppose but if you cannot make this via TV browser directly its better than nothing.

[sandmix]

Thank you for this detailed explanation, I checked my tv it is roku based and I couldn't make ble working. Will 5.2 version. For https will use nginx if needed.