WiFi.macAddress() returns 00:00:00:00:00:00 before WiFi.begin()

[sans-ltd]

Board

ESP32-Mini 1U

Device Description

Hardware Configuration

Version

v3.1.1

IDE Name

VSCode

Operating System

Linux

Flash frequency

40Mhz

PSRAM enabled

no

Upload speed

115200

Description

• When calling WiFi.macAddress() before WiFi.begin(), we cannot get the MAC address.
• With Arduino 2, it worked because it used esp_read_mac() as fallback, if WiFi was not initialized yet.
• If we call WiFi.begin(), our station does not work correctly, we cannot see the WiFi with another device. In Addition, the WiFiAccessPoint example also does not call WiFi.begin()
• Reading the MAC address with esp_read_mac(mac, ESP_MAC_WIFI_STA) works fine though, without initializing the WiFi first.

Sketch

setup()
{
  auto mac = WiFi.macAddress();
  // mac is 00:00:00:00:00:00
  // do some magic to generate an SSID
  WiFi.softAP(name.c_str(), passwd.c_str());
  ...
}

Debug Message

-

Other Steps to Reproduce

No response

I have checked existing issues, online documentation and the Troubleshooting Guide

• I confirm I have checked existing issues, online documentation and Troubleshooting guide.

[me-no-dev]

The network layer has changed. You can call the following APIs to get the STA MAC without connecting to anything

WiFi.STA.begin();
auto mac = WiFi.STA.macAddress();

[me-no-dev]

To get the base MAC address, you can also do directly:

auto mac = Network.macAddress();

[sans-ltd]

Yes OK, thanks for the hints. But it is quite unintuitive and breaks with Arduino 2.0 in the behavior.

And it is a real use case to create the SSID from the MAC address when setting up a station, where you normally would not call begin.

[me-no-dev]

v3 is a major version update that does break some APIs. It is for the best though. Especially in the Network layer :)

And it is a real use case to create the SSID from the MAC address when setting up a station, where you normally would not call begin.

Best to use Network.macAddress() in that case to get the ESP's unique base MAC, from which all other MACs are derived