I would like to use WiFi-Direct (P2P) to communicate directly from a Photon to a smartphone (Android) without any other WiFi access point/router nearby. I plan to have a custom app on the Android to accept, display and process data from the Photon. I see there has been some discussion on the topic but not enough detail to see the hooks. Is there a SoftAP for WiFi-Direct on the Photon? Any help and/or examples will be greatly appreciated.
@Bonz, not sure about wifi direct but take a look here:
https://docs.particle.io/reference/firmware/photon/#softap-http-pages
It’s not strictly WiFi direct I think, this feature is milestoned for 0.6.0
softap≠WIFI Direct
If you’re going to make statements like these, it’d be nice that you’d at the very least explain them, otherwise there’s very little added value…
Ok I will. To quote thinktube.com
"Wi-Fi Direct™ is not an IEEE standard, but a Wi-Fi Alliance technical specification called "Wi-Fi Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Specification". It allows Wi-Fi devices to connect to each other and form groups, usually one-to-one, but also one-to-many. Wi-Fi Direct devices negotiate their roles in the connection: one of them assumes the traditional role of Access Point (AP) called Group Owner (GO) and the other devices, including non-Wi-Fi Direct enabled devices, connect to the AP/GO as clients in station mode. While we will argue below that this is not true peer-to-peer in the usual meaning of the phrase, we follow the term "P2P" as it is used in the specification in the rest of this description.
Wi-Fi Direct has some minimal requirements like the use of 802.11g, RSN (WPA2) with AES-CCMP encryption, Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS), WME (WMM) quality of service, and OFDM data rates for management frames. P2P devices use their global MAC address as Device ID during discovery and negotiation, and a temporary local MAC address for all frames within a group. Action frames and additional Information Elements (IE) are used to transport the details of the protocol."
To quote Wikipedia
"SoftAP is an abbreviated term for "software enabled access point." This is software enabling a computer which hasn't been specifically made to be a router into a wireless access point. It is often used interchangeably with the term "virtual router"."
These differences matter a lot because in the case of connecting multiple Photons together all of these Photons are reliant off of that one Photon running a softap. If that Photon ever goes down then the other Photons can't communicate with each other. With WIFI Direct each Photon can communicate with each other without the need of a ap. Wifi direct frequency hops and softaps do not.
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This would a very useful feature for what I’m working on as well.