I had a frustrating experience that I’d like to share - as it might be helpful to others. Recently I had my modem upgraded by the telcom. After they left I had a mess - as they hadn’t changed some of the settings from the old modem to be the same as the new one. That meant I had to resign in on EVERY device my family uses: from the smart TV to the thermostat!
Especially problematic was our printers. They are older so I had to go into the router and reconfigure the settings to allow “b” connections as well as change the Auth Mode.
It took a while but it worked on everything but my Arduino devices! They just wouldn’t connect (ESP8266) no matter what I did! I changed the settings and nothing worked… until out of desperation I COPIED the SSID network name DIRECTLY from the router settings - BINGO! It worked but if I typed it in (EXACTLY) it wouldn’t. Upon looking at the properties of the text I found the installer had used some rarely used font! WHich leads to the question can font choice cause problems in the sketches?
Jeff
What exactly do you mean by “font” ?
Pete.
you know, the name of the font like “Times New Roman” or “Bookman”. In this case the font name was “Consolas.”
No, fonts make no difference, and it’s impossible to specify the font when entering text in the IDE.
SSID and password are both case sensitive.
In future, it may be simpler to change the SSID and password in your new router so that they are the same as your old SSID, assuming that you have access to do this. It’s also sometimes possible to create additional SSIDs and passwords that operate alongside the primary ones - maybe as a guest account - where you can specify different credentials
In fact, this is how I configure my router and WAPs, with a separate set of WiFi credentials for my HA system.
It’s also worth noting that ESP8266 and ESP32 devices can only connect to 2.4GHz networks.
Pete.
Thanks Pete. I’m fairly conversant on changing my router settings. I had to dummy them down for my old printer. As far as I can tell my new SSID is the same as my old one: kuggle’s_condo_2 . And of course I know through experience to be only on 2.4Ghz. NEVERTHELESS. If I type in the SSID it doesn’t work. If I paste it in from the router info, it works. Yet they’re (to my eye) the same. (yes I checked that they’re underscores and not dashes.
I do like your idea of setting up the guest account for my projects.
Jeff
I’d guess that it’s the apostrophe that’s actually a different ACSII character to the one you think it is.
Pete.
I never thought of that, Pete. I’ll examine and report.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio
Okay, I’ve finally found the answer. It’s the apostrophe (’) in the name. The apostrophe is different in my SSID (entered by the telco guy) than the standard font on my keyboard. He used some bizzare font on his notebook. Normally punctuation doesn’t matter in most devices. Hence all other devices in the house don’t care which font is used. I believe the programs IGNORE punctuation. However in the arduino case, punctuation is treated as a specific character with a MAC address. A different style apostrophe would have a different address. If it’s not identical to what was originally typed into the router, the arduino program won’t accept it. I’ve been getting around this by cutting and pasting. You might wonder why I just don’t change the router address. I’m afraid if I screw around with it and I’m WRONG, my wife will kill me as we’ll have to change about 25 devices again. So the lesson here is don’t use punctuation in your SSID
Just to clarify, it’s not about fonts.
Here are a few versions of “apostrophe” type characters, all in the same font, but different ASCII characters, all typed from the keyboard of my iPad…
‘ ’ ’ `
As I said before…
I think the character that was typed into your router’s SSID was one of these other apostrophe type characters. Your other devices, such as smart TVs etc that have a virtual keyboard will present a certain ASCII character as the apostrophe, and this happens to match your router.
When you type an ASCII character from your computer keyboard into your sketch in the IDE, you are using a different ASCII character. This might be because you are using a keyboard in a different language, or you have a different keyboard language selected in your computer’s regional settings, or simply that you are hitting a key that produces a different ASCII character.
MAC addresses have nothing to do with this, it’s SSID name. MAC addresses are something totally different.
Pete.
Sorry. I meant ASCII.
Jeff