ESP8266 Community Forum

- Mon Nov 30, 2015 6:27 am #35339

@eduperez,
A WiFi dongle is of course the simplest ... by far ... solution. However, my thinking is that the Pi Zero brings the "computer" (i.e. high end embedded device) down to the low-cost embedded price range. When we look at the cost of a WiFi dongle, we see that the average prices is about $10 while we can get ESP8266 modules for about $2.50. I can extrapolate to a time when we may want to build projects that are based upon a Pi Zero and need WiFi but, for some reasons, we want the cost to be minimal ... sacrificing convenience and simplicity for price.

And there is obviously the "I made this myself" factor, or we all would not be here
I all makes sense now, I just wanted to know if there where further reasons I had not understood; thanks.

Additionally, assuming that Raspberry haven't got exclusive contracts with the SoC makers, I could expect to see Pi Zero clones coming ... and I can imagine a Pi Zero clone coupled with an ESP8266 on a single PCB advertizing itself as Pi Zero compatible with built-in WiFi ... but in order for that to be real, the embedded Linux running on Pi would have to know how to driver a peer ESP8266 ... and I'm assuming that would be at the device driver level.

Well, I would not count on that... Arduino was successful, and there are dozens of clones available; but Raspberry Pi was also successful, and there are no clones (at least, I am not aware of any) even if it has a higher price tag (and a greater margin for a clone), so I would bet there will not be clones for the Raspberry Zero. Just my two cents.

- Mon Nov 30, 2015 6:44 pm #35392 Yes it' s no sens about cost reduction,,,with ESP maybe there is 1Mbit bandwith in the better case, so the usb dongle at 2-3$ is the cheaper solution with large bandwitch (real 20mbit). The probleme with unknow dongle 2-3$ is the driver for linux...almost prefer a 10$ dongle working out of the box in linux environnement!
The only interest for an auxilary soc system is to survey the Pi, stop n start with a battery, for configuration out of the box with a wireless tty.
Each time of fail configuration, loosing network, there is the need to reconnect wire of the usb serial from an other computer to Pi, at home it ok but in a concrete project for business, not acceptable in my opinion.

- Mon Nov 30, 2015 7:25 pm #35395 The RTL8188 USB Wifi dongle is pretty cheap, around $3.00, and driver is easy to compile.
I'm using them on some of my OrangePi-PC.

- Tue Dec 01, 2015 12:14 am #35412 I think it (linux driver <--> 8266) can be done if one develops an SPI-based firmware/interface to the 8266 that is akin to what CC3000 uses. I've often thought about doing that as an alternative to AT commands. But this would be a pretty hard project. It would be much faster to just use a wifi dongle as others have suggested.

Some of my work