ESP8266 Community Forum

I've played with PICs and WiFi on a PC but don't understand the internals. Any reason not to buy esp-12, which seems to be the most flexible, although some are programmed to an odd AP, how difficult to reprogram? Any advice gladly accepted.

George

The -12 appears to be one with extra pins and not 0.1" centers, so it is hard to hook up. I would start with one or two of the 4x2 0.1" center versions and get those going as there are more things like diagrams on how to hook it up. Also a 3.3v regulator or supply and a 3.3v TTL UART to USB adapter, and the usual breadboard and jumper wires.

If you want get both, but get that first one working, the devtools, the flash tools, play with Lua as well as AT, etc. When you are familiar, then swap in the -12.

I have both. The -12 required me to solder the same 8 wires (actually 7), but also GPIO15 since that had to be pulled low to boot. It was very hard to find that bit of information. I'll be playing with it some more, but the SPI isn't working, GPIO4 on mine always returns high for the input. The ADC does return 0-1023 for about 0-1v.

tz1 wrote:[...] GPIO4 on mine always returns high for the input.

And I thought I was the only who had that problem. xD

My opinion - i've got three dev boards (and two others in the post from china!) and would recommend two of them. I should do a comparative review when they all arrive!!

The limpkin one is great, high-end and breaks out all the pins of ESP-03 in a really nice way together with a build in usb-bridge. The way to go if you can afford a few quid and want a little breadboard area right next to the chip for small circuits.

The olimex one is also very good, has all the pins including adc, rst and GPIO16. Plus it's cheap and has 2M flash memory vs normal 512k for these modules.

I'm also looking forward to getting a nodemcu devkit board - it looks really nice in the pictures and I wanted to support the project - it was a great early christmas present to many of us when it was open-sourced

Once you get going with one of these dev boards you can save a few quid by getting the cheaper modules. I've got most of them for completeness but I could get by with just a couple of dev boards at the moment.