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We made an open source ESP8266 dev board for makers
- intrepidhero 6y agoPretty rad! I could see lots of applications. Available on amazon you say? 19.99 you say? https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08GY2GTW5?ref=myi_title_dp https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08GY2GTW5?ref=myi_title_dp I'm curious about availability. Are they ready to ship? Awaiting preorders? EDIT: Oh I see 18 in stock. Probably remains of a small run to gauge interest. I hope it takes off. I'm going to make it 17. :-)
- fellowgeek2020 6y agowe have more stock, just waiting to transfer to Amazon
- tobib 6y agoAny plans to make it available in Canada?
- phantom784 6y agoInteresting. Seems fairly comparable to the Sonoff Basic (also ESP8266, retails around $5), but more DIY friendly. Are you planning to sell a case to go with it?
- fellowgeek2020 6y agoYes we probably design a case that you can 3D print and will add it to GitHub soon ish
- jhallenworld 6y agoIs the antenna open source? Is it characterized (bandwidth, efficiency, radiation pattern)? Almost like one from here: https://www.ti.com/lit/an/swra351a/swra351a.pdf https://www.ti.com/lit/an/swra351a/swra351a.pdf
- anfractuosity 6y agoI believe it's called a 'Meandered Inverted-F Antenna (MIFA) ' I used the footprint from https://github.com/prasad-dot-ws/ESP32_MIFA_PCB_ANTENNA https://github.com/prasad-dot-ws/ESP32_MIFA_PCB_ANTENNA recently, which is based on Espressif's gerbers for a sample pcb.
- gramsejr 6y agoYeah the antenna footprint is actually that one provided by ti. I had created a footprint from that pdf but then I found a kicad footprint somewhere that looked a little nicer than my rudimentary skills. This was my first design with an antenna and I am certainly not a good rf engineer. I'd appreciate any tips and feed back.
- makerboardzz 6y agoCool - it looks like a well-designed board, although the timing is a bit unfortunate with the ESP32-S2 emerging as an ESP8266 replacement with USB. A few questions: * Should the relay have some sort of isolation, like an optocoupler? * Is it FCC-certified? * Like other people asked, any information on how the antenna was designed? I like the old-school dome LEDs. And it's cool to see another project with a CH340 USB/USART bridge, even if they wouldn't need it with an ESP32-S2.
- pdabbadabba 6y ago> * Is it FCC-certified? It would certainly appear to lack the FCC ID label/marking it is required to have if it is FCC certified. So probably not. Thus, it also appears doubtful whether it can legally be marketed or sold in the U.S.
- conk 6y agoA search for "Malouf" on the FCC registration website provided no matches. Most likely this product is not registered. In addition, this product lacks a CE mark and has no UL/FM/CSA listing. I'm curious what creepage/clearance requirements were factor into the design. This product is potentially dangerous if the relay is switching line voltage.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- simcop2387 6y agoIANAL, But I think device as-is can likely be sold and marketed perfectly fine. Test-kit and dev-kit stuff is regulated a bit differently under the assumption that it's not going to be in mass use, and also that it's likely going to be used to develop another product that will get the fcc certification. https://emcfastpass.com/fcc-rules-kits-subassemblies/ https://emcfastpass.com/fcc-rules-kits-subassemblies/
- pdabbadabba 6y ago
- iwebdevfromhome 6y agoCool board! The only thing I think would be a nice-to-have is an integrated wifi module.
- mattgrice 6y agodoesn't esp8266 have wifi built in?
- 6c696e7578 6y agoESP8266 does, source, have several and: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESP8266 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESP8266
- mrspeaker 6y agoI have an interest in electronics and would call myself a "maker" (well, I have a growing box filled with various arduinos and microcontrollers)... but after scouring the repo and the website, I can't figure out what this is, or what I could do with it! What is an "ESP8266 board"? Is that something that is so common it doesn't need explaining? Of course I will google it [and probably buy one], but just pointing out that it's not very clear from the website! [EDIT: ok, after 10 minutes of googlin', it seems no one will explain what it is - it's just "an esp8266 system on a chip". It must be the first rule of ESP8266 club...]
- inamberclad 6y agoI mean, it's another ESP8266 based board with a bunch of GPIO and a relay that looks like it's meant to switch line voltage. It's handy but absolutely not revolutionary.
- jkubicek 6y agoMy info is 5+ years old at this point, but when I last looked into the ESP8266 they were the de-facto easiest/best way to add Wifi to your microcontroller. I have an older ESP8266 board that i used to create a tiny server and tweet stuff for me. The older board didn't have integrated USB, which made the dev process annoying.
- jsharf 6y agoEsp8266 is a microcontroller which is incredibly popular in the maker/hacker movement for it's low cost and wifi integration. You can add a relay to this microcontroller and put it on your wifi network and use it to switch appliances on/off from the internet quite easily. If you read hackaday, you'll run into esp8266 projects regularly. It's a bit harder to get started with than your average arduino project. If you want, you can use the Arduino IDE which hides a lot of the complexities. But the docs from espressif are aimed more at the firmware engineer crowd, so if you want to get serious there's more of a learning curve (IE nvflash partitions, understanding what a bootloader is, etc). Also, you'll probably end up getting into freertos at some point, which further complicates things. But it's a super great module for home projects. The esp-32 is a newer chip which is similar but adds bluetooth. In general you're better off going with esp-32 nowadays -- it's got a second core as well. Until recently the only thing missing was USB (though there were bit-banged USB implementations!). But now there's an esp-32 with USB too, so really for the cost, the features are unparalleled. If you're okay with things not being as polished as the Arduino experience (you might have to learn "real" firmware programming), it's really the best starting choice for your side projects.
- ausjke 6y agoI too want to have this FCC certified. $19.99 seems a bit expensive to me though.
- ComputerGuru 6y agoThe biggest/best reason I know for using ESP8266 is the integrated WiFi module, but it seems that this doesn’t expose that or at least capitalize on it, which gives little incentive to use this over something like the Teensy. Is there any intention to add WiFi support to the dev kit?
- xigency 6y agoIt appears that there is an antenna on the PCB so I believe WiFi is supported here. Outside of that, the ESP8266 is a pretty nifty CPU itself. Depending on what you want to do, a Teensy might be what you want. The ESP chips do not have an FPU for example.
- taf2 6y agoFrom board picture it looks like a wifi antenna is on the board, maybe WifiClient.h would work?
- fellowgeek2020 6y agoYes ESP8266 has WiFi Built-in but thanks for the pointer, I will update the description to reflect that fact.
- mianos 6y agoWho has used RS232 voltage for serial in the last 10 years? I'd rather a few MOSFETs to cut the power to everything for lower power. I guess there is a specific market for this and it is not me. I have at least 20 of Esp8266 and esp32 boards around the house. A bit of fun to design and produce though. I would not bother with the ESP8266 anymore considering the marginal cost of the esp32 and it is a much better device, learnt from their mistakes. The new one with on chip USB looks great too.
- fellowgeek2020 6y agoHaha, we built this internally to use with Axiom scanners in our fulfillment centers which use RS232 interface, those scanners are 20 years old. I convinced my boss to let me sell these as open source since we found many cool IOT uses for them around the office as well, that's why you are getting the RS232 on there but most people probably will not need that feature, but hey... it is there if you need it :)
- mianos 6y agoIt's a reflection on a great workplace culture to share like this. It's not the board for me, but nice you released it anyway. When those MAX232 chips came out many years ago they blew our minds having the charge pump for the negative voltage. Too bad we could never buy them at the time a the lead time was so long.
- dheera 6y agoI have. Roboteq motor controllers use RS232 voltage levels :-/
- snvzz 6y agoIf the cable is longer than a few centimeters, the voltage makes sense. rs232 can run quite long distances.
- snarfy 6y agoYeah, I'm regretting getting the esp8266 not knowing of the esp32. Besides being a better device for basically the same price, it has better tooling from espressif.
- mraza007 6y agoJust curious not really familiar with electronics but what can i build using this
- fellowgeek2020 6y agoHere is a few ideas: Alexa enabled switch to turn on / off a TV using the IR blaster my boss used 3 of these this to build a smart sprinkler system for his house.
- mraza007 6y agoOh that’s so cool Thank for the suggestion. I’m really trying to learn more about hardware.
- peterburkimsher 6y agoMouse and keyboard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPBzOaLbWhM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPBzOaLbWhM Ethernet: https://github.com/cnlohr/espthernet https://github.com/cnlohr/espthernet PAL TV: https://hackaday.com/2016/03/01/color-tv-broadcasts-are-esp8266s-newest-trick/ https://hackaday.com/2016/03/01/color-tv-broadcasts-are-esp8... I haven't yet seen an FM transmitter though, but it's been done on the Raspberry Pi GPIO so I guess it could be done on the ESP also.
- chill1 6y agoGet an Arduino starter kit and start hacking on some little project around the house. With a bit of persistence, C/C++ is not so difficult to become productive coming from almost any other language. And with the help of platformio's [1] CLI tooling it makes uploading and debugging your code on chips like the ESP8266 (or ESP32 or Arduino) pretty straight forward. Then of course there are the actual physical pieces of hardware, wires, circuits, components, etc. It's a whole new world in which to learn and break stuff. Good luck! [1] https://docs.platformio.org/en/latest/what-is-platformio.html https://docs.platformio.org/en/latest/what-is-platformio.htm...
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- tobib 6y agoLooks interesting. How would I program it, do I need a FTDI board? Also I wish it was available in Canada.
- sokoloff 6y agoIt says it can be programmed over the microUSB (just like an Arduino).
- bschwindHN 6y agoIt has a CH340 USB-UART chip onboard, so it looks like no need for an FTDI board.
- fbkr 6y agoMaybe I'm missing it but I wish there was an ESP8266 board with a proper JTAG connector. I have hacked something on a protoboard for nodemcus before, but it ended up being pretty messy.
- sowbug 6y agoI built something like this but more special-purpose. It just switches a USB-A power source on/off. I wanted it to control my 5-volt fish-tank lights. I didn't want to use a 120VAC smart switch for each light because I prefer to use a single USB hub to power them all, and a bonus feature was being able to PWM the lights so the fish aren't freaked out when the lights suddenly turn on 100% in the morning. I ordered PCBs from JLCPCB and components from LCSC. I think each one cost around $5 in parts, and I hand-assemble them as I need more around the house. https://github.com/sowbug/smart-usb-switch https://github.com/sowbug/smart-usb-switch Picture: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sowbug/smart-usb-switch/master/completed.jpg https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sowbug/smart-usb-switch/ma...
- fullstop 6y agoI made lights using ws2812b leds and simulated sunrise, sunset, and a dim blue throughout the night. I used ws2812b leds, wemos d1, and a level translator since the d1 has 3.3v gpios but ws2812b technically requires a 5v signal.
- scns 6y agoThat sounds awesome, can you do a write-up about it please?
- andruby 6y agoFor the software part, WLED [0] really does just about anything you’d want to do with those led strips. I drive the wemos d1 and led’s from a 12V battery with a 12-5V stepdown converter. I attach the 5V to the esp and the led’s. The 3.3V logic level works on the first led and is repeated at 5V to all subsequent led’s. [0] https://github.com/Aircoookie/WLED https://github.com/Aircoookie/WLED
- fullstop 6y agoApparently 3.3v doesn't always work with the strips, and newer ones are less likely to work, especially if you're working with a lot of lights.
- polishdude20 6y agoI recently created a board for the nrf8001 Bluetooth low energy chip. I see your antenna section isn't fully open since that LED is in the way, have you considered rearranging things so that PCB antenna has an unobstructed path on the left and right sides?
- elcritch 6y agoFun looking little board. Great to see people sharing these things! It makes me wonder if there’s interest in more of these type ofESP* dev kit boards. One I haven’t seen is one with just Ethernet PHY but no Ethernet jack/magnetics. It’s been useful in my designs to have a ETH+/- that can be brought out to various Ethernet / PoE setups. Something like the wESP32 is handy for kits but not for integration.
- squarefoot 6y agoCnohlr did just this, although he strongly suggests using proper interfacing, but having the bare signal wires at hand can be useful for chip to chip communications on the same board. One could build a board with N ESP chips then connect them directly by daisy chaining their TX and RX pins, that is, passing packets in circle, or behind an Ethernet switch chip, de facto creating a board level local network. Might be interesting for some applications. https://github.com/cnlohr/espthernet https://github.com/cnlohr/espthernet
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- spirobel 6y agothe wifi stack onthe esp8266 is a mess. it also does not support the latest espressif sdk. so you should buy an esp32 module and dont bother with this. ( the price is 3 bucks instead of 20)
- matthewfelgate 6y agoInteresting project. By why no USB? Why does it have a Relay?
- gramsejr 6y agoWhat do you mean by no USB? There is a CH340C uart to USB chip onboard and a micro usb port. Is there something specific you're looking for? The relay would just be used as a switch to turn on/off an external device using higher voltages, AC or DC.
- new_here 6y agoNice. There's also a project called FEMU, which is an ESP32 Wi-Fi/Bluetooth board that fits in a USB port: https://hackaday.io/project/167005-femu-an-esp32-wi-fibluetooth-board-in-tomu-form https://hackaday.io/project/167005-femu-an-esp32-wi-fiblueto...
- moneytide1 6y agoCharles Lohr has done some neat projects with this board. Recently he made this post and I've never thought about this level of hand-holding interaction with the silicon itself. https://twitter.com/cnlohr/status/1307890077041909760 https://twitter.com/cnlohr/status/1307890077041909760