Surface Go to the rescue

Our little company, Connected Humber, has got a stand at the upcoming Humber Tech Expo. I’d spent a few days prepping the devices for the demos, took them along to the Bonus Arena and plugged them in and …. they all failed.

Oh good.

The only computer I had to hand was my tiny Surface Go device. I’d brought it along because it weighs almost nothing and you never know when you might need a full fat Windows installation. I fired up Visual Studio Code, pulled down the latest release from GitHub and started investigating.

The fault was interesting. The WiFi code in the ESP8266 seems to be upset by very large numbers of available access points. It shows its displeasure by running out of memory and crashing. There wasn’t time for an elegant solution so I removed the WiFi scan, hard wired the connection details and got it working before they had even managed to get the mains connection to our stand.

I’m going to have to dig into the code later in the week and find out just what is going on. But at least I’ll have something to show off tomorrow. If I’d not thought to bring the Go along, it might have been a different story.