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We made an open source ESP8266 dev board for makers

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Re: We made an open source ESP8266 dev board for makers

#91

Post by squarefoot »

elcritch wrote: post #60

Fun 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.

Cnohlr 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

Re: We made an open source ESP8266 dev board for makers

#92

Post by dTal »

sowbug wrote: post #51

I 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 PCB…

>PWM the lights so the fish aren't freaked out

How certain are you the fish can't see the PWM?

Re: We made an open source ESP8266 dev board for makers

#93

Post by lostlogin »

mianos wrote: post #67
sagarm wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the esp8266 much lower power than the esp32?

No the ESP32 uses less power. In deep sleep it uses about a quarter of the current. It also has an extra low power processor (ULP) core than can run in a sleep state and do IO without even waking up the Tensalica cores. The ESP32-S2 actually has a Risk-V core that runs as a ULP. As I said, it's better in every way.

This is quite a good write up of the difference. https://blog.voneicken.com/2018/lp-wifi-esp-comparison/

Re: We made an open source ESP8266 dev board for makers

#94

Post by lostlogin »

chill1 wrote: post #39
mraza007 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh that’s so cool Thank for the suggestion. I’m really trying to learn more about hardware.

Get 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…

So much this. You can tie in to Home Assistant quite easily. You can then make all sorts of things. Buttons to turn things on, screens to show data from Home Assistant, measure things (distance, door open/closed state, humidity, light/dark, weight etc). The sensors are nearly all really inexpensive and seem to be pretty accurate. From knowing nothing to having something functional working takes a few hours. It’s great fun and anything with lights and sound gets kids involved very easily.

Re: We made an open source ESP8266 dev board for makers

#95

Post by [deleted] »

jsharf wrote: post #44
mrspeaker wrote: post #17

I 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 t…

Esp8266 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 w…

[deleted]

Re: We made an open source ESP8266 dev board for makers

#97

Post by 05 »

na85 wrote: post #79
konschubert wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am sure this is something will be able to answer: I need to build a custom board for an ESP32 which should support low-power deep sleep and which should contain some additional circuitry (is that what you call it?) to drive an Eink display. Basically this[1] board, but a different shape and better low-power sleep properties. If I wanted to design this board myself, how long would it take to learn this? Are there go…

>If I wanted to design this board myself, how long would it take to learn this? Are there good resources? To learn it yourself, assuming no prior experience or knowledge, would take years of full-time study.

We’re talking low speed data lines and run of the mill digital circuits, not 10GHz range RF amplifier design. A month is probably enough.

Re: We made an open source ESP8266 dev board for makers

#98

Post by sowbug »

dTal wrote: post #92
sowbug wrote: post #51

I 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 PCB…

>PWM the lights so the fish aren't freaked out How certain are you the fish can't see the PWM?

Haha, good point. I believe the ESP8266 default PWM frequency (via the Arduino library) is 1KHz, which is well above the ranges cited in the Wikipedia article for flicker fusion threshold across animal species. In my very limited testing, my fish didn't flee under plants as readily when the lights turned on more gently.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flicker_fusion_threshold

Re: We made an open source ESP8266 dev board for makers

#99

Post by [deleted] »

konschubert wrote: post #82
StavrosK wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you already made the circuit on a breadboard? If so, learning KiCAD and building the board from scratch would take around a week of afternoons. I really recommend it, designing PCBs is very enjoyable (at least to me).

How would I work with SMD components on a breadboard?

[deleted]

Re: We made an open source ESP8266 dev board for makers

#100

Post by konschubert »

05 wrote: post #97
na85 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If I wanted to design this board myself, how long would it take to learn this? Are there good resources? To learn it yourself, assuming no prior experience or knowledge, would take years of full-time study.

We’re talking low speed data lines and run of the mill digital circuits, not 10GHz range RF amplifier design. A month is probably enough.

Okay, so now I know it’ll take between 5 years and one month :D

On the one hand, I have a bit of prior knowledge. On the other hand, I want a circuit with minimal power draw in ESP32 sleep mode and i’m afraid that does require some experience.

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