Particle Electron with ESP8266-01S (WiFi)?

Hi my name is Chris, I am new here. I’ve brought the Particle Electron and tried several things - everything works pretty well. I’ve tested the Google geo location API / integration and everything works just fine! But it is very inaccurate because it is only using the cell towers for positioning because the Electon lacks wifi. With wifi the accuracy would be much better, because google API scans the AP around you and takes that into account. So I brought the cheap and small ESP8266-01S wifi module. Is there a way to use it with the Electron? And even if it works, how will the Google integration know that wifi is availible? Thank you very much in advance. Greetings from Germany

Sure, the Electron can communicate with an ESP8266 or any other µC multiple ways (UART, I2C, SPI, …).
You’d just need to program the ESP8266 to scan the availble APs and have it communicate its findings to the Electron which in turn can pass the found data to the integration.

However, I’ve not seen anybody do that yet in this community.

ok WOW, that was fast. Thank you very much. Mmmhh … nobody ever tried it before … you have any idea how to get started? I am a developer, but getting into this µC stuff is really hard.

First I'd decide on the actual interface you want to use.
If you haven't a lot of experience with µC programming you may want to start with UART Serial1 on the Electron and a simple communication between the two units.
Then you'd investigate what data the WiFi geo location integration expects.
Then you'd investigate how you acquire that data on the ESP8266 side and write the code that sends the data to the Electron.
There you catch that data, optionally rewrap it into the needed format for the integration and pass it to the cloud.

I didn't say that, I said I have not seen anybody report about it on this forum.

Cool thing! It helped a lot. I will look into UART Serial1. If I get anything to work/run, I will post it here.

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Are you looking to add WiFi just for geolocation? If so, it would be simpler and much more accurate to incorporate a GPS module instead of using WiFi.

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