I Don't What I'm Doing, & May Be in the Wrong Spot

[BigNutz]

Hey everyone!

Go ahead and grab a coffee or you're glass pipe, whatever will keep you conscious the longest. This post we've a touch long, and no, not for any reason you would see as legitimate. Shall we?

So, about twice a year, the old OCDs kicks in and I find myself engaged in an audit of my Wifi Router active device list, partly to make sure my sure my neighbor Stephan hasn't figured out my password again, but also to satisfy that OCD and make sure all connected devices are labeled intuitively. If it's a smoke detector, it better not be located as "NEST55942chydg" which I find is an issue whenst I do these audits. So, as you can probably guess, the limited random designation associated with some device was thrown into the Goggles, and here we are!

Based on the reading I did do here, it's starting to sound like this may be related to some Raspberry Pi tinkering I've been doing over the last couple weeks. Actually, tinking intimates a sense of confidence in the tradecraft, and that's not at all accurate in my case.

I have God only knows how many different Smart Home devices half integrated with each other, but despite myself still working after all these years. The potential this mystery device is a device within that system isn't very likely based on my aversion to cloud-based automation and resulting tendency to heavily prefer using the local-based protocols such as Z-Wave & Zigbee. There is very limited crossover between those devices operating over WiFi and those over the Z-Protocals (August Smart Lock), so I feel like I would have seen this already. Let's be honest, if I have any Z-Wave or Zigbee devices showing up in my Wifi Router's OTA connection list, I've got bigger problems to deal with.

So that brings me back to my recent work trying to make a few Raspberry Pi's work the way I want workout looking like a caveman bludgeoning a rock. For the record, I'm looking to identify and integrate the most effective and feature rich civilian aircraft ADS-B data sensors which are as close to plug-and-play as one can get it. In that effort, I've been flipping switches like a straight up Compton gangsta, circa 1995! Now then, if you could try to avoid those distracting digressions, we can start the formal assessment to identify with as great a measure of confidence as possible, what this ambiguous designation is associated with.

There are two of these, both of which do not retain network connectivity perpetually. I don't have any patterns related to this because I was too busy writing this AWESOME post for you guys... You're welcome! So we should just focus on the first set of letters, as I'm relatively certain the numbers after those letters are meaningless for this exercise. So without further a due, this is the devices designation insofar as the WiFi router is concerned:

ESP_C36480

Please, not all at once, I'll get nervous. Seriously though, anyone have any idears (totally threw that 'r' in as a distraction) as to what my mystery device (s) could be? If it's anything weird like "Of yeah, that's those cameras that get hidden in clocks and smoke detectors so weird people can record me doing weird things, and seek the videos too weirder people". If that's the case, I'm not sure if I wanna know... Use your judgement, I trust you guys with anything, right? Right?

Seriously, though, thanks!!

BN (not a reference to any oddly sized body parts, for the record)

[username]

Well, since you seem like you like a good story here's mine.

I had a similar situation. One day I was bored and decided to have a look at all the devices connected to my router.
I noticed 2 ESP_xxxx things on my network. I panicked, and immediately changed the network name and password.
This time around I decided to do mac filtering, and only allow them connectivity via their mac address. Each time I added a device I wrote down their mac number. Then spent like two hours going through all the gizmos in my house one by one and setting them to the new network name.

I have 2 alexa enabled outlets. When I added them is when i saw the name ESP_xxxx in the network list.
SOoooo, in my case the ESP_xxxx devices were my 2 wireless outlets.