WiFi boards: some way to standardize the handing and recovery from errors

[deadprogram]

This issue is intended to start a conversation about some ways to improve and process the different errors that can occur, and also do so in a consistent way for all of the various WiFi adaptors.

For example:

• adaptor error with the hardware itself
• wifi error such as losing connection with the access point
• network error such as the remote machine dropping connection
• protocol error such as mqtt errors (in theory handled already by mqtt package?)

maybe we want to define handler functions, so that applications can do whatever seems correct for that application. for example, wifi error handler could be called on losing connection with access point, and could try to reconnect.

If no handler is set up for disconnections, it may be a good idea to reconnect. Of course, the handler can be overridden.

At the very least make it pretty easy to hook up a handler to a typical behavior, even if not the default. If you have an adaptor error, maybe you want to write a handler to try to restart the adaptor by setting some pins to power cycle it.
We probably do not need to provide the typical behaviors, just the hooks then we can look at enhancing it based on what we need ourselves, and what other people ask for.

This is in part based on conversations already started with @sago35

Chime in humans of TinyGo!

[deadprogram]

Related attempts to address some of these things:

#311
#445

[aykevl]

• adaptor error with the hardware itself
• wifi error such as losing connection with the access point

I agree, a hook that allows handling these in a graceful way would probably be the cleanest approach. Especially for wifi errors. For adapter errors, I'm not sure: it should in theory not happen but of course it happens in the real world. I guess the driver could deal with it by resetting the adapter and trying again (triggering a network error on all open connections because they all got reset with the adapter reset).

• network error such as the remote machine dropping connection
• protocol error such as mqtt errors (in theory handled already by mqtt package?)

I think these two should be propagated as usual. For example, if you do a send or receive but there is a network error, the operation should exit with an error.

[deadprogram]

Thanks for the feedback @aykevl