This research deep dive was inspired from using my Dust Collector Remote . It works great, but after a year using it I’ve found the delay to connect pretty annoying. On bad days with a router misbehaving the 4 or 5 second delay while I’m waiting to turn a tool on can get frustrating.
This started getting me thinking about how it could be handled faster. I’ve used ESP-Now a handful of times and have appreciated it’s quick boot to ‘do something useful’ time. But in past projects, I’ve mostly used it as a raw socket and formatted my own messages. Wouldn’t it be nice to have MQTT infrastructure without the setup latency of WiFi or the complexity of BLE/GAP/GATT? I also spent some time dabbling with CoAP a bit this year and while it seems common to treat it more like HTTP, but when using features like Observe Resource it looks a lot more like MQTT or BLE Notifications.