- Tue Aug 04, 2015 3:01 pm
#25030
This thread is a scam!
Well, ok, maybe not a scam, but the title is, at best, misleading, and the thread seems to be full of unnecessary and unfounded histrionics..
This is a summary of my understanding from this thread, based on everything that's been said so far:
1. The ESP-12E is
not a scam, and is a legitimate module produced by AI-Thinker, just like the ESP-12. (that legitimate module is what's pictured as "OK" and compared against in the very first post. If there aren't any real ones, then what are those supposed to be?)
2. HOWEVER, there are at least two different modules being sold as "ESP-12E". Some (with the rounded corners) appear to be of lesser quality, at least superficially (mislabeled pins, etc).
3. Nobody knows whether the "other" ESP-12Es are actually fakes or not. They might be knock-offs made by another company, they might be earlier production runs made by AI Thinker (which then corrected some of the issues in later runs), or they might even be later production runs by AI Thinker (which would be an unfortunate quality trend, but certainly possible).
4. The different versions of the ESP-12E appear to have somewhat different internal designs, but to date nobody has been able to determine whether there is any functional difference between them, or whether one performs better or worse than the other. They both appear to have the same specs "on paper" (i.e. same flash size, same pins brought out, etc)
So in short, there are SOME "ESP-12E" modules which MAY be fakes, or may not, and nobody knows whether it really makes any difference to end users or not.In any case, ESP-12E is not such a big deal in itself to justify copying... I understand the new pins are just useful if you want to extend SRAM, right?
I'm kinda surprised nobody has pointed this out thus far, but those extra pins on the 12E are not just for SDIO. They're apparently all GPIO pins as well (by the look of things, GPIO6 - GPIO11). This means that while the ESP-12 only has 11 GPIOs, the ESP-12E actually brings out the full 17 GPIOs supported by the ESP8266EX chip! For some applications, this seems extremely worthwhile to me.
(Note that some of the pins can also have additional functions as well, such as MOSI/GPIO8 which is also the previously-un-exposed RX pin for UART1 (meaning that the ESP-12E actually has two fully bidirectional UARTs))
