ESP8266 Community Forum

- Thu Oct 08, 2015 8:56 pm #30915 Howdy folks,
I try and study ESP8266 and have a variety of modules including ESP1s, ESP12s and now ... NodeMCU boards.

But here is where I am starting to run into language issues.

When I hear the phrase "NodeMCU" ... I am not sure if folks are talking about the Lua language, the open source board or both.

What does the term "NodeMCU" mean to you and is there an agreed upon definition that I should follow when I hear or say "NodeMCU"?

Neil

Free ESP8266 book available for download here.

- Thu Oct 08, 2015 9:42 pm #30918 I thought it pertained to the firmware

- Thu Oct 08, 2015 10:45 pm #30922 I'm watching an IRC chat right now and a chap just said:

"I've done my last test on nodemcu and I thought it would flash without the need of this silly GPIO0 and reset but found that it still need it."

In his conversation, he means the "NodeMCU development board".

Free ESP8266 book available for download here.

- Fri Oct 09, 2015 2:23 am #30929 AFAICT, NodeMCU started as a software project with porting LUA to ESP-8266.
The developers needed a stable board so they designed the Node-MCU board hardware originally with ESP-12, and made it available for sale.

Sometime after that, they open-sourced the hardware, which then underwent a couple revisions, and started being produced by other vendors such as Amica.
I just received two Node-MCU boards ordered through AliExpress, bot have ESP-12E.
One of the two is the Amica one. It is narrower than earlier versions, with same pin alignement, and has a CP2102 USB/TTL chip, the other board is an 'old' version, no-name, a tad wider and has a CH340G USB/TTL (no issue with USB drivers on Win7|8.1, both work OK)

Both came with the AT firmware (v 1.2) dated June 2015, but not NodeMCU. I guess they just get the ESP-12E modules from AIThinkers and don't bother flashing them. That's fine by me, keeps the price low (now under $5!).

So, bottom line, to me Node-MCU now refers to a ESP-12 board with integrated USB northbridge and specified pinout.

Greg