ESP8266 happiness
It just goes to show that perseverance sometimes pays off. It turns out that the reason I couldn’t get the Olimex esp8266 to work properly was that my USB/serial converter was faulty. The replacement one arrived today, and now I can program the wifi module using the arduino IDE with no problem. Five seconds after programming it, it had connected to my home network and was sending temperature …
ESP8266 disappointment
I found a very promising new ESP8266 module, from Olimex (a Bulgarian company).
It’s a breadboard-friendly board with an ESP8266 and 512k of flash memory on it, and it’s dead cheap. There’s even a carrier board for it, with a relay and a reset button, also dead cheap. I bought a couple, because it exposes all the pins from the microcontroller, so I can (a) use more than one I/O, …
The King is dead. Long live the king!
For a while now, I’ve been playing with the super-cheap esp8266 WiFi module. It’s been a bit of an uphill struggle, mostly because of the poor documentation (actually, that’s not fair - the documentation may well be excellent, but my understanding of Chinese isn’t) and the lack of easy programming tools. Until now, there have been essentially three ways of using the module: …
Never mind the Buzzclock
Fair warning So far, only one person I’ve told about this project thinks it’s a good idea. Everyone else looks at me wtih a mixture of pity and puzzlement, neither of which emotions seems to be mitigated by my explanation. Clearly, the best thing to do with the project is to bury it quietly, and where better to commit something to obscurity than on my blog?
A little bit of background …
More tiny WiFi success
As I have posted before, I have been playing with the super-cheap WI07C WiFi module based on the ESP8266 chip. I’ve now had sufficient success with it that I can publish a post on a working project. This simple setup uses an Arduino nano to read temperatures from to 18BS20 sensors, formats the data as JSON and then sends it over WiFi to a server on my home network. It’s cheap and …
Wifi success, for a change!
I’m actually having success in connecting the super-cheap WI07C wifi module to my home network, so that an arduino can send data anywhere.
[caption id=“attachment_373” align=“alignnone” width=“300”] WI07C module featuring esp8266 chipset[/caption]
I can now reliably establish a TCP connection and send data back and forth. It works rather well, with some …
WiFi for less than a fiver
Last week, the excellent hackaday ran a story about a new WiFi module (the Wi07c) based on the ESP8266 chip. It is eminently suitable for attaching to an arduino or similar, but it only costs $5. As I’ve been whining for some time about the high cost of WiFi shields for arduino, this piqued my interest. I bought a couple from the electrodragon store and have now had a bit of time to play …
New Arduino tutorial
At tonight’s Hull Digital Hardware Meetup, we will be doing the fourth tutorial on Arduino programming and interfacing. This one involves Things Beginning With The Letter ‘I’, so if you have narcissistic tendencies you may enjoy it. Or you may have completely misunderstood.
The tutorial notes are available on the Arduino page