6 ms·

ESP8266 was awesome, but lacked many useful features: - ADC (Analog to Digital converter) - IPv6 (IoT-chip without IPv6, come on..) - Bluetooth BLE - Enough

by pi-rat 10y ago

ESP8266 was awesome, but lacked many useful features: - ADC (Analog to Digital converter) - IPv6 (IoT-chip without IPv6, come on..) - Bluetooth BLE - Enough RAM to pull of talking many of the protocols you might want to use over the internet. - etc.. etc.. ESP32 supports this.

semi-extrinsic 10y ago
Actually, the v7 and v12 (the most common ones recently) have a single ADC pin.
- TMSZ 10y ago
  With a piece of kynar wire same pin can be connected on "old" ESP-01. Little hard to solder though.
StavrosK 10y ago
Yeah, IPv6 is pretty important. I only have a few ESP8266 around the house and my DHCP pool is getting rapidly depleted...
- lifeeth_ 10y ago
  You must have a lot of ESP8266 to deplete ~256^3 ips.
  - StavrosK 10y ago
    My home router can't really do more than about 100ish IPs.
    - SEJeff 10y ago
      Sounds more like time to get a new router vs changing all of your internal home network to ipv6
    - KeytarHero 10y ago
      How is switching to IPv6 going to fix that problem?
      - ptman 10y ago
        Maybe ipv6 slaac would help compared to dhcp. Not by much, but maybe a bit
      - Tiksi 10y ago
        The router won't have to hold a NAT table for ipv6 devices, just relay router announcements.
TMSZ 10y ago
ESP8266 has ADC. It does not have DAC, however for some purposes (e.g. low quality audio over WiFi) I2S output can be used with DMA as PWM output. Isn't IPv6 supported for ESP8266 with lwip?
Unklejoe 10y ago
How can a chip support or not support IPv6 in this case? Isn't it a layer below anything which would require direct hardware support? In other words, wouldn't it be implemented in software. I should point out that I know nothing about the ESP chips. Or do you mean that the ESP8266 has hardware acceleration for IPv4 but not IPv6?
- pjc50 10y ago
  Probably the availability of enough code ROM and runtime RAM to support dual-stack operation, if it simply didn't fit before.
  - revelation 10y ago
    Eh, probably they didn't bother with IPv6 when butchering random BSD code for their hacked-together "SDK".
- yuubi 10y ago
  From the docs (but not actually messing with any actual parts), it looks like the 8266 has an IPv4 stack in ROM.
tzs 10y ago
The big annoyance for me is lack of a wake on GPIO activity capability. The ESP8266 only has "wake on timer" and "wake on reset". I'm making a home weather station with a tipping rain gauge which pulses a switch whenever it tips, and an anemometer that pulses a switch once per revolution. To make those pulses wake an ESP8266, I'd have to make them reset it. That can work, and many people have done it, but it is annoying. For the anemometer I can switch to just checking the speed when I wake up to check and report temperature. I'd miss short variations in wind speed that way, but that could be acceptable. For the rain gauge, though, I need to be aware of every pulse. I considered adding a dedicated non-microcrontoller based counter for the rain gauge to accumulate counts between periodic wake-ups of the ESP8266, but that turns out to be more expensive than using a microcontroller. An ATTiny85 could monitor the rain gauge and count the pulses, and could provide in I2C interface to the ESP8266 to make it easy for the ESP8266 to get the results, and would only take one small chip and socket. That led to me to consider the ATTiny84, which is like an 85 put has several more GPIO pins. Current plan is to use an 84, have it run all the weather sensors and do all the math, and use the ESP8266 just for reporting results. The ATTiny processors can wake from deep sleep on GPIO activity so can deal with the rain gauge and anemometer directly. The ESP8266 can spend its time in deep sleep, only waking up every N minutes to send a report.
- lsllc 10y ago
  Try a 1-wire counter, e.g. the DS2423 [0] for the rain gauge. It can be powered either from the ESP or via a coin-cell. You read the counters whenever you need to. You can talk to 1-wire either via I2C (e.g. the DS2482 [1]), or you can easily bit-bang 1-wire via a GPIO or UART [2]. [0] https://www.maximintegrated.com/en/products/digital/one-wire/DS2423.html https://www.maximintegrated.com/en/products/digital/one-wire... [1] https://www.maximintegrated.com/en/products/interface/controllers-expanders/DS2482-100.html https://www.maximintegrated.com/en/products/interface/contro... [2] https://www.maximintegrated.com/en/app-notes/index.mvp/id/214 https://www.maximintegrated.com/en/app-notes/index.mvp/id/21...

by pi-rat 10y ago

semi-extrinsic 10y ago

Actually, the v7 and v12 (the most common ones recently) have a single ADC pin.

TMSZ 10y ago
With a piece of kynar wire same pin can be connected on "old" ESP-01. Little hard to solder though.

StavrosK 10y ago

Yeah, IPv6 is pretty important. I only have a few ESP8266 around the house and my DHCP pool is getting rapidly depleted...

lifeeth_ 10y ago
You must have a lot of ESP8266 to deplete ~256^3 ips.
- StavrosK 10y ago
  My home router can't really do more than about 100ish IPs.
  - SEJeff 10y ago
    Sounds more like time to get a new router vs changing all of your internal home network to ipv6
  - KeytarHero 10y ago
    How is switching to IPv6 going to fix that problem?
    - ptman 10y ago
      Maybe ipv6 slaac would help compared to dhcp. Not by much, but maybe a bit
    - Tiksi 10y ago
      The router won't have to hold a NAT table for ipv6 devices, just relay router announcements.

TMSZ 10y ago

ESP8266 has ADC. It does not have DAC, however for some purposes (e.g. low quality audio over WiFi) I2S output can be used with DMA as PWM output. Isn't IPv6 supported for ESP8266 with lwip?

Unklejoe 10y ago

How can a chip support or not support IPv6 in this case? Isn't it a layer below anything which would require direct hardware support? In other words, wouldn't it be implemented in software. I should point out that I know nothing about the ESP chips. Or do you mean that the ESP8266 has hardware acceleration for IPv4 but not IPv6?

pjc50 10y ago
Probably the availability of enough code ROM and runtime RAM to support dual-stack operation, if it simply didn't fit before.
- revelation 10y ago
  Eh, probably they didn't bother with IPv6 when butchering random BSD code for their hacked-together "SDK".
yuubi 10y ago
From the docs (but not actually messing with any actual parts), it looks like the 8266 has an IPv4 stack in ROM.

tzs 10y ago

The big annoyance for me is lack of a wake on GPIO activity capability. The ESP8266 only has "wake on timer" and "wake on reset". I'm making a home weather station with a tipping rain gauge which pulses a switch whenever it tips, and an anemometer that pulses a switch once per revolution. To make those pulses wake an ESP8266, I'd have to make them reset it. That can work, and many people have done it, but it is annoying. For the anemometer I can switch to just checking the speed when I wake up to check and report temperature. I'd miss short variations in wind speed that way, but that could be acceptable. For the rain gauge, though, I need to be aware of every pulse. I considered adding a dedicated non-microcrontoller based counter for the rain gauge to accumulate counts between periodic wake-ups of the ESP8266, but that turns out to be more expensive than using a microcontroller. An ATTiny85 could monitor the rain gauge and count the pulses, and could provide in I2C interface to the ESP8266 to make it easy for the ESP8266 to get the results, and would only take one small chip and socket. That led to me to consider the ATTiny84, which is like an 85 put has several more GPIO pins. Current plan is to use an 84, have it run all the weather sensors and do all the math, and use the ESP8266 just for reporting results. The ATTiny processors can wake from deep sleep on GPIO activity so can deal with the rain gauge and anemometer directly. The ESP8266 can spend its time in deep sleep, only waking up every N minutes to send a report.

lsllc 10y ago
Try a 1-wire counter, e.g. the DS2423 [0] for the rain gauge. It can be powered either from the ESP or via a coin-cell. You read the counters whenever you need to. You can talk to 1-wire either via I2C (e.g. the DS2482 [1]), or you can easily bit-bang 1-wire via a GPIO or UART [2]. [0] https://www.maximintegrated.com/en/products/digital/one-wire/DS2423.html https://www.maximintegrated.com/en/products/digital/one-wire... [1] https://www.maximintegrated.com/en/products/interface/controllers-expanders/DS2482-100.html https://www.maximintegrated.com/en/products/interface/contro... [2] https://www.maximintegrated.com/en/app-notes/index.mvp/id/214 https://www.maximintegrated.com/en/app-notes/index.mvp/id/21...