ESP8266 Community Forum

Hi all,

I am quite new to this forum and really excited by all the work already done for this little device.

I have ordered the "01" version and still waiting to receive it (China is far away from France )

I am already familiar with Microcontrollers (Microchip mostly) and Windows and Android development and have the "Open source spirit" (see my web site :freedom2000.

My first application would be to try to improve my APA102 LedStrip. It is already working with a "chain" including :
[Android Smartphone]<--Wifi or Bluetooth-->[device]<--UART-->[PIC MCU]<--SPI bus-->[LedStrip]

Here is a short video to try to give you an idea of the current situation :



In this chain the bottleneck is clearly the UART between wifi device and MCU. It is running currently at 115200 bauds which is not as fast as I would like.

My idea would be to replace the device+ MCU by a ESP8266 and use directly the SPI Master capabilities to have a much faster display.
My basic questions :

1) What would be the best firmware to do such ? Lua with nodeMcu or something else ?
2) Would it be easy to ingest "raw data" from UDP or TCP and to directly feed the SPI Master ?
3) at which speed could such a chain run ? (faster than UART ?)

Any help appreciated
Thanks in advance
JP

esp8266 has hardware SPI that runs at several MHz. You can simply get a ESP07/12 to have access to it. Roll your own firmware since you have MCU background. It is not hard.

Or with a steady hand, a magnifying glass, and a soldering iron he can have hardware SPI with the ESP-01.