ESP8266 happiness

arduino-2 esp8266 arduino esp8266 wifi
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

arduino-2 esp8266 arduino esp8266 olimex
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!

arduino-2 esp8266 arduino esp8266 iot
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: …