Concepts First

• Wi-Fi: a wireless LAN technology. Devices connect to a router (AP) over radio waves instead of cables, and phones, laptops and smart-home devices mostly get online this way.
• Band and protocol: the Ai-M6x (BL616/BL618) supports 2.4GHz 802.11 b/g/n. 2.4GHz penetrates walls well but sees more interference than 5GHz.
• SSID and password: the SSID is the hotspot's name, the password is the passphrase needed to join. Both must be correct to connect.
• STA vs AP: STA (Station) is the "client" role that joins someone else's hotspot; AP (Access Point) is the "hotspot" role that lets other devices join. The module supports both, and can run AP and STA at the same time (see Soft-AP Mode).
• Channel: the 2.4GHz band is split into channels (1–13), like separate "lanes"; using different channels reduces interference between nearby devices.

Ai-M6x Wi-Fi Capabilities

The Ai-M6x series (Ai-M61's BL618, Ai-M62's BL616) comes with a complete Wi-Fi stack in the Bouffalo SDK; official examples live in examples/wifi/. The typical workflow has three steps:

1. Initialize the Wi-Fi stack: the example prints PHY RF init success! at boot, then goes through Starting wifi ... / Starting fhost ...;
2. Connect to a router: run wifi_sta_connect <SSID> <password> in the serial shell; CODE_WIFI_ON_CONNECTED appears when associated and CODE_WIFI_ON_GOT_IP when an IP is obtained;
3. Use the network: once online, run TCP/UDP/HTTP/MQTT/SNTP applications.

Section Navigation

Topic	Page	What it does
Basics	Connect Wi-Fi	Join a router as STA — the prerequisite for every network app
Basics	Soft-AP Mode	Turn the module into a hotspot that phones/PCs can join
Basics	SNTP (Network Time)	Sync time from an NTP server, no manual calibration
TCP	TCP Client / TCP Server	Reliable connection-oriented transport
UDP	UDP Client / UDP Server / UDP Broadcast / UDP Multicast	Connectionless, fast transport for streaming and device discovery
HTTP/S	GET / POST / PUT / DELETE / HTTPS	Standard web/API requests; HTTPS is the encrypted variant
Messaging	MQTT / MQTTS	The most common publish/subscribe IoT protocol
Advanced	WebSocket / HTTP OTA / RESTful API	Two-way long connections, remote firmware updates, HTTP server on the module

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