ESP8266 Community Forum

Hi all,

I'm thinking of doing a project with RGB floodlights connected in a mesh network.
Each floodlight will have it's own ESP that connects to the mesh and controls the color/effect of the floodlight.

I have experience in arduino programming and the adafruit huzzah breakout. However, for this project I'm trying to find a more cost effective ESP module.

I hope to find a cost effective ESP module or breakout board that meets my requirements:

- 3 PWM enabled outputs
- breakout preferably takes 5v to power it
- programming from the arduino IDE by usb or usb to TTL cable

I started looking at the ESP-11

But this has only two I/O pins, I need three for RGB PWM

Then there was a link to the ESP-12:


Then the same shop is selling wemos D1 mini boards for the same price, E5,-

I found these on banggood for E2.99


I guess the wemos D1 mini meets my requirements. However, is there a more cost effective board ?
I would need 20 of these eventually.


Suggestions are welcome,

Thanks !

I think either the Wemos mini or esp-12f would be a good choice. They are equivalent in terms of their raw esp8266 functionality / IO

Wemos - Plus built in usb serial for initial programming and regulator for running from 5V

esp-12f Plus smaller / cheaper (1.6E) but needs external serial usb for initial programming and 3.3V power.

Once initially programmed both can use OTA for further software updates so the lack of USB is not too much of a downside if one has a rig for initial programming.

if you can get cheap ESP-01 go for it, they are easily used on 0.1" spaced pcb and you can use Rx/Tx pins as additional i/o once you flashed them externaly. But beware that there are some restrictions on levels on Rx (like for gpio0/2) and maybe "interfering" signals on Tx at boot-up

Well, I think I'll go with the wemos. Think it saves me some tinkering that will probably cost me some serious extra time/work. The price, compared to the total costs it's not that significant either.

Thanks