It looks like someone with quite some experience tinkering with Arduino’s and the likes decided to sit down on a rainy sunday afternoon to write Santa a wishlist with everything he would like to see in the next Micro Controller Unit. However, that wishlist wasn’t sent to Lapland, but to China, where the good folks of EspressIf have materialize this wishlist in a brilliant little ARM based controller that is clocked at 80Mhz and can be overclocked to 160Mhz (For reference, Arduino’s run on 16Mhz), it has WiFi built-in, has 64KBytes of instruction RAM, 96KBytes of data RAM and 64KBytes boot ROM and has a Winbond W25Q40BVNIG SPI flash for your code. On top of that, it has GPIO, I2C, ADC, SPI, PWM and actually some other nice acronyms. One of the biggest advantages is the fact that it is really dirt-cheap though. With a price of only $4, it is actually cheap enough to be put in everything and anything.
Because of that, I have also started playing around with the chip and ordered a few of them through Banggood and Aliexpress. Please find some of my experiences with the chip below:
- Getting started with the ESP8266
About where to buy the chip, setting up your own toolstack and getting your first blinky to run.
- ESP8266 Open SDK
This is actually quite similar to my first blog post, except that it uses the Open SDK instead of EspressIf’s SDK. The Open SDK has received quite some attention by the community and may be better to use as your go-to SDK.
- How to program an ESP8266
Lays out the basics on how to do native programming of the chip in C.
- Linking the ESP8266 to a Raspberry Pi through MQTT
MQTT is excellent for light-weight distribution of messages based on pub/sub. This blog explains how you can get the ESP8266 to communicate with an MQTT server.
- ESP8266 programming from Eclipse
If Linux is not your thing, this blog explains how you can get started developing native firmware for the ESP8266 using Eclipse on Windows.
- Why you should use MQTT in IoT projects and why SAP should support it
This blog explains why MQTT is probably the best communications protocol for IoT devices and why SAP should support it from the IoT service stacks.
- Connecting an ESP8266 to the SAP HANA Cloud Platform
A blog about getting the ESP8266 to run as an autonomous IoT device, running in a cloud scenario (using SAP’s HANA Cloud Platform), and communicating securely over the public internet.
- New version of the NodeMCU board
I’ve ordered the new version of the NodeMCU from China to see how this version would behave on a breadboard. Excellent!
- Arduino programming on the ESP8266
The ESP8266 community has added the ESP8266 board to supported boards from the Arduino IDE, allowing Arduino code to run on the ESP8266. I definitely wanted to give that a try.
- Because every house needs Wifi
Just because every house needs Wifi, I just had to squeeze an ESP8266 in the battery compartment of Haseenah’s miniature christmas houses. Batteries have been replaced with a USB phone charger on the mains and light can be controlled through Wifi.
- Because every house needs Wifi
Just because every house needs Wifi, I just had to squeeze an ESP8266 in the battery compartment of Haseenah’s miniature christmas houses. Batteries have been replaced with a USB phone charger on the mains and light can be controlled through Wifi.
- Really no excuses for not starting ESP8266 IoT experiments anymore
The ESP8266 has become really cheap, and even development board that get you started real quick have seen the same price reduction. There are really no excuses not to start your own esp8266 experiments anymore.
- Over-the-Air ESP8266 programming using PlatformIO
Introduction to PlatformIO and updating firmware over-the-air. Also shows how to get from scratch to a complete #esp8266 toolstack on a Mac in just 5 statements
- ESP8266 based Veranda Control box
This is an update on my latest home automation project, in which I have automated veranda control using an ESP8266, relays, push buttons and a DHT22 thermometer.
Hey, i want to make an ESP8266 extender, when your ESP8266 connect to router then he have internet access, but when i connect with my phone on ESP8266 and i go on web browser i don’t get google. i wana ask you if it’s possible to connect on ESP8266 and have connection on phone to go on google (like extender).
In fact, the ESP8266 has all ingredients to work as a Wifi extender or repeater. It can run in both AP and client mode and its wlan interface can work in promiscuous mode. You may run into some issues with the available memory though. But if you are giving it a try, I would be very interested in following your ventures!
Hello Jan, short question, you mentionned the esp can work in promiscue mode.
How can I setup this mode?
Do you have a smal example?
I just need a trigger from the esp when a certain IP address comes along.
Hi Wim,
It’s really simple. Using SDK routine wifi_promiscuous_enable you can switch the ESP to promiscuous mode. You can find an example here: https://codegists.com/snippet/arduino/esp8266-wifi-beacon-generatorino_kost_arduino
Cheers,
Jan
[…] Jan Penninkhof has some neat ESP8266 projects over on his blog and he decided that UI5 was absolutely essential to his automated veranda control box (;TLDR version: He wanted to be able to configure newly installed ESP’s with their basic info and network settings from pretty much any HTML5-capable device). The main problem being that a bare-bones UI5 build, without an application or any extra configuration files, weighs in at about 4MB. Jan’s blog is a neat tale of how he sheared, pruned and trimmed down UI5 to be able to fit it into the ESP8266 available flash space and still do useful stuff with it. Definitely worth a read! […]
Hello Jan,
My name is Tony Tachev. I live and work in Bulgaria.
Thank you very much for your article “ESP8266 programming from Eclipse.
I installed and made some code application, but I have troubles with debugging process. Does Eclipse have a possibilities to debug in simulation mode without ESP8266 to be under control?
Thank you in advance!
Tony
Hi Tony,
It should be possible to debug your firmware using Eclipse CDT. Have a look at the chapter “Live Debugging with Eclipse CDT” on the page below. I hope that’ll be able to help you out.
https://blog.attachix.com/live-debugging-with-open-source-tools-programming-for-esp8266-part-4/
Cheers,
Jan
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I wonder how a lot effort you put to make such a great informative web site.
Hii
Thanks a lot for sharing this awesome info about esp8266 . by connecting this small module with ardinuo now we can be able to access internet . this small module elimates the need of ethernet shield . i have question reguarding this module that does it uses AT commands to communicate ???