Wifi connection with ESP32-S3

[Foster-05]

Hello all,
Recently I've been trying to connect an Espressif S3 devkit to the internet and it's been having lots of trouble. For example, this morning I take my working code from Friday and run it, and it connects with no issues and prints its IP address. I also try this with a WPA2 Enterprise network, where I originally started having issues. This also works and prints its IP address. Then I add in an API call and suddenly neither work. When I call wlan.connect(ssid,key), I either get OSError: Wifi Internal Error, which gives no helpful debugging information. I've tried exporting more verbose error messaging to a separate file and only that line shows up. I've also tried setting wlan to inactive before setting it to active, as well as manually calling wlan.disconnect() before connecting, in case there are leftover connections from a previous run. I'm curious as to why this would work and then suddenly stop: even switching to another devkit and running the original unedited code from Friday doesn't work anymore. Does anyone have experience with this issue, or with WPA2 Enterprise on Micropython? The code is appended below for reference.

import time
import network
import urequests

# Add delay at start of main.py
time.sleep(2)

wlan = network.WLAN(network.STA_IF)

wlan.active(True)
time.sleep(1)  # Give time for activation

wlan.connect('ssid', 'key')

# Wait for connection with timeout
timeout = 10
while not wlan.isconnected() and timeout > 0:
    time.sleep(1)
    timeout -= 1
    
print(wlan.isconnected())
print(wlan.ifconfig())

Thanks!

[bikeNomad]

I have found that the status often changes during connection; I typically implement a status polling task that watches wlan.status() until either a timeout (after 30s) or the status has stabilized for at least 7s. Upon a failed connection, I also implement a re-try after 2 seconds (after wlan.active(False)).
Successful connection is when wlan.status() stabilizes at network.STAT_GOT_IP, and failed connections are detected like this:

def _fatal_sta_status(status: int) -> bool:
    return status < 200 or status in [
        STAT_NO_AP_FOUND,
        STAT_WRONG_PASSWORD,
        STAT_BEACON_TIMEOUT,
        STAT_ASSOC_FAIL,
        STAT_HANDSHAKE_TIMEOUT,
    ]