Best way to send text to ESP8266 remote display

Question

I need a remote display to show information sent via WiFi from another ESP8266. What needs to be sent is a string along with some variables, for example a string to be displayed along with two integers for the position on the display:

0, 12, "message to display on screen"

As I am absolutely new to network stuff, what would be the best way to achieve this?

• Sending a POST request through REST API?
• Use UDP instead?
• Or better use a framework like MQTT?

• Mark Smith: Define "best". For example, easiest to implement? Most reliable? Most flexible? Smallest code size? Most easily extensible? Easiest to expand? Or, maybe you don't want best, but adequate..? There are examples in the SDK of how to connect to wifi and send and receive data.

Answer 1

Try the esp8266 UDP messages

With UDP you can send and receive messages quite easily and without consuming lots of resources.

• user317: Thank you! I'll check back as soon as I've learned something about UDP.
• user317: UDP was exactly what I need.
• Allen Edwards: I set up one esp8266 as an access point sending udp messages to multiple displays. The remote displays connect to the access point and then can receive whatever is sent. The displays are esp8266 devices as well. This works well and I can have multiple displays all listening to the same udp messages. This thread is pretty old but I would just lend support to the reply of using udp for a remote display. You will occasionally miss a message so that needs to be considered. In my testing it was rare, like maybe 1% of the time. If you must get the message there, another protocol might be more approp