AutoConnect VS NimBLE-Arduino

And for Wifi management on ESP32, this awesome repo that "does it all": https://hieromon.github.io/AutoConnect/ -- this repo creates its own access point you can connect to with your phone to pop-up a "captive portal" (like you see at hotels or airports) to enter your own Wifi credentials -- this is only done once -- after that, the ESP32 will connect to the last known good Wifi network. If you don't want that, just use the built-in Wifi functions to create a local Wifi hotspot to connect to. Then creating web pages on the ESP32 is easy -- you can use the "PageBuilder" JSON syntax, or host regular HTML/JS/CSS files on the SPIFF/LittleFS partition and server those in response to incoming requests.

Or if you don't want to have a hardcoded ssid and password in your program, you can use the AutoConnect library

I want the device to be portable, so I want the esp32 to automatically reconnect to Wi-Fi every time I switch it off and back on. I have used this library, and it serves the exact purpose of what I want to do in my project : https://github.com/Hieromon/AutoConnect

I want to save power on a battery powered sensor but I also want to have AutoConnect set up to set up and configure the wifi. Since having the wi-fi running it can take up a lot of energy I would like to make sure that none of the battery is used during the programming set up. I was thinking that the AutoConnect would only run when it detects that it is plugged into a 5v usb port. I also want a switch so that the usb can power either the sensor (lower power) or the wifi configuration (high power) parts of the program. How would I best accomplish this?

It is this one right: https://github.com/Hieromon/AutoConnect ?

The code will be built using the esp32-nimble crate. The esp32-nimble crate is a wrapper for the ESP32 NimBLE Bluetooth stack. The crate is inspired by the NimBLE-Arduino project. NimBLE is an open source BLE stack fully compliant with the Bluetooth specification providing both host and controller functionalities. NimBLE is also part of the Apache MyNewt project. The ESP-IDF supports only a port of the NimBLE host stack and provides a different controller implementation.

I originally tried using the ESP32 blue BLE library. I ran out of memory. Switched to NimBLE-Arduino, an Arduino fork of Apache NimBLE, a replacement open-source BLE library https://github.com/h2zero/NimBLE-Arduino https://www.arduino.cc/reference/en/libraries/nimble-arduino/ https://h2zero.github.io/esp-nimble-cpp/md__migration_guide.html#autotoc_md46

I like NimBLE-Arduino, and this has a BLE client example that you can adapt to your needs, including both regular reads and notifications. Note that this isn't pure C++, this is using Arduino. There's also a version for use with ESP-IDF: esp-nimble-cpp, with a corresponding BLE client example. The examples for both projects are heavily commented and quite easy to follow.

On the ESP32 side, I use this repo for Bluetooth connectivity: https://github.com/h2zero/NimBLE-Arduino

u/Marijn_fly's is the cleanest solution I can think of but if you're ready to get your hands dirty, there's another BLE library called NimBLE that's massively smaller that the one you're using. Plus I'm an incompetent noob and I find it being easier to work with :D

I recently also looked into this and the NimBLE GitHub and examples helped me a lot to implement this. Source: https://github.com/h2zero/NimBLE-Arduino

Try to implement a driver myself using the NimBLE stack. However, I don't know where to start working with a BLE gamepad.

You indeed need an advertisement packet scanner. Arduino version could be e.g. this: https://github.com/h2zero/NimBLE-Arduino/blob/master/examples/BLE_Beacon_Scanner/BLE_Beacon_Scanner.ino