ESP8266 Community Forum

- Mon Aug 10, 2015 10:41 pm #25619

My desoldering skills are really lacking, and the chances of my successfully desoldering a four-pin header would be about 50-50.

Desoldering single pins is much easier, just cut the plastic to seperate the pins before desoldering. Then heat the pins, pull them out and use some solder wick to clear the pin holes.

- Tue Aug 11, 2015 1:52 am #25628 Because those things are so cheap and you want your first one, take the most feature-rich widespread one: ESP-12E. It has lots of pins to use. Don't forget the breakout board too so you can use those on breadboards.

Later, when you are going to build something specific, you can choose different model just for that one project.

- Tue Aug 11, 2015 2:23 am #25633 Or ESP201.

- Tue Aug 11, 2015 10:54 am #25678 If your soldering skills are a little weak and you are looking for something with

1) Lots (relatively) of exposed GPIO pins
2) 0.1" spacing

you are going to pay a bit more for something ready to go out of the box. Some choices are:

- Adafruit Huzzah $10 US (an ESP-12 pre-soldered to a breakout board)
- Olimex WIFI-ESP8266-DEV $9 US DigiKey (their own board)
- Electrodragon ESP8266 SMD Adapter Board R2 $6.20 US (an ESP-12E pre-soldered to a breakout board)
- NodeMCU v2 $13 US Seed Studios (an ESP-12 pre-soldered to a breakout board)

You still have to solder the headers yourself on at least the first three, not sure about the NodeMCU. Things change fairly rapidly so by the time I post this something else may be available.