ESP8266 Test Board

I mentioned that Espressif were kind enough to send me a test board to play with – and very nice too. Not had time yet as I’m struggling with learning how to make an installer for my Node-Red package – with some great help from the guys involved with this….

So meanwhile here’s a lovely diagram – which I asked Espressif for specifically so you could see what the board does.

If you double-click on the image you will get a larger version. What’s really nice are the logical groupings. Not TOO keen on the tiny connectors on the right – but the main ones are 0.1” standard stuff. Quite looking forward to having a play.

 

ESP8266 Development Board

13 thoughts on “ESP8266 Test Board

  1. hello,
    someone can help me with the compiler of the ESP8266?
    how can i compile c code for the esp8266 ?
    do you know freinly IDE enviroment for windows ?
    thanks

  2. Tip Line: …here’s another little adapter board for the ESP12, this time with an opto-isolated triac for mains switching. It isn’t perfect (it -really- needs mounting holes and a silk-screened skull and crossbones “mains voltage” warning, among other things), but at $14 for 10 from Dirty PCBs it’s not going to break the bank. Version 3 could be a nice little money-maker for “Tracker J” if he/she Tindie’s it. 🙂

    http://www.esp8266-projects.com/2015/04/p2-wifi-web-power-switch-for-mains-mpsm.html

    1. Hi,

      I'm working on a 2 Relay board check it out  at http://zazolabs.com/.

      It has mounting holes and HV markings. 🙂

      check it out, i'm working on a revision that will add some more features.

      It's not yet in the wild but it will be when it gets good enough.

  3. Thanks for that. Your reply prompted me to look into the ESP8266 a bit more and I think by itself it could do everything I might want an added Arduino for, including possibly driving the display. The Lua stuff looks like it’s stabilised a bit, but I’m sure that if the need arose a C-based system could be easily flashed in.

    Its biggest appeal to me is that it’s pre-built and having everything I might need tied together in one unit means I would have less worry about having to design PCBs at a later stage needing SMT components (time and expense, two major factors for me right now, so minimal fiddling about designing boards is important). I did have a look at the Sparkfun link you gave, but the WiFi would have to also be added and integrated by me which I don’t fancy.

    What does make me wary about it is what seems like a reliance on external web services to provide some of the functionality but perhaps this is just an ease of use thing rather than a requirement. There’s still plenty of time to think about it anyway and to see what you come up with yourself.

  4. Hi Peter, what do you think of this kickstarter project? https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/piccolino/piccolino-arduino-compatible-wifi-oled-sram-sd-car

    It looks like it would tie in quite nicely with what you’re doing and would be a middle ground between getting a dev board or building one’s own. It also looks like it would be a good fit with the guts of a USB wall-wart if a suitable enclosure was found (and the screen could conceivably be used to show stats like power usage and switching activity). I’m on the fence at the moment about backing it because I’m not sure if it’d be a waste of money. Seeing as you’ve got some experience with the ESP2866, I’d be interested to know what you think before committing anything to it. Cheers!

    1. Well let’s see, they’ve taken a serial display, a LUA-based ESP which exists already, Arduino IDE compatibility which also exists already though I’m not convinced it is ready for prime time yet (the MQTT offering need work for reliability in the case of loss of connection etc) and stuck thme together. So I guess what they are offering is merely the size and convenience of having them together. For me I’d want to be assured that a C programmer could easily incorporate the display as I’ve long since given up on the Lua software. There’s not enough RAM to make decent size projects in Lua (not entirely sure of the significance of the serial RAM).

  5. Hmmm… Blue lines on a green board doesn’t do a lot for us “colour-challenged” seniors. 🙂 Gets a wee bit difficult to see what is going on around the SDI/SPIO and PWM area. It does seem obvious though that with so many I/O pins there must be a lot of either/or choices to be made with the interfaces (ie:- IO14 is used just about everywhere). That’s fine for a dev board, though.

    What’s the switch in the bottom-left corner, Pete?

    The top-RH side looks like “User defined LED + Switch”. And is that a jumper-selectable off (the ESP8266) board flash chip nestled in by the FDTI?

    If this carrier had been for the ESP-12 I’d have been very interested. As it is, I’m on the fence until we find out more about the on-board ESP8266 module. Any whispers on pricing yet?

    -John-

    1. That ESP board looks like a true ‘development’ board, geared towards evaluation and software development, rather than something that’s intended for small-run programming or an end-use. So that would explain why its ESP daughterboard doesn’t match any of the currently available ESP modules. Most microcontroller dev boards are made like that.It’s the sort of thing that manufacturers make available to companies so that their engineers can immediately start evaluating without the hassle of whipping up the platform. (so Pete, you are truly in Espressif’s good books)

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