ESP8266 Community Forum

- Sun Mar 27, 2016 8:06 am #44127 This weekend I built a new "clean" ESP8266-12F chip on one of those white breakout boards. I bought the chips and breakout boards from Aliexpress a little while ago.

Running the same version of NodeMCU the "clean" board works just fine. It's now been in my Polytunnel for 24 hours waking up, reading and posting data over WiFi. My Gizwits development board would not run for more than an hour or two without locking up on wake up.

So I wonder if the issue is just with Developer boards. They have many additional components which the clean one does not.

I made my circuit on stripboard, used a very low drain LDO Voltage Reg (MCP1700-3302E) a 10uF cap on the 3.3v output, a 120ohm resistor on the wake up circuit. I've used two GPIO pins - one to power up the DHT22 and the other to read it. This has now been running off an 18650 Li-ION battery for 24 hours and wakeup/deep sleep cycles of 10 minutes. All seems to be good so far.

- Sun Mar 27, 2016 1:27 pm #44136 Hello, I must admit that I had no problems at all with the Huzzah Breakout, it never hangs.
Only Feather Huzzah hangs in my case.

One question, regarding Huzzah and battery duration:
- during deep sleep I noticed that the red led is slightly dim, you have to turn off all lights to notice it (I noticed it by chance)
I added a pullup resistor to GPIO0 and now it's compeltely dark. Testing now the enhanced battery duration.
- with LDO PIN I can disable the regulator. Since I have nothing connected to the huzzah, if I turn it off do I save some battery?

I ask because I'm unable to measure uA with my multimeter, when I set it to uA the Huzzah doesn't turn on. Also, the minimum measurable is 200 uA.

- Mon Mar 28, 2016 3:57 am #44156

- with LDO PIN I can disable the regulator. Since I have nothing connected to the huzzah, if I turn it off do I save some battery? - See more at: viewtopic.php?f=32&t=8663&p=44136&sid=b6fe6b4e9225f18aded65e7f07a84ea2#p44136

isn't the esp8266 powerd by the ldo? so switching it off might have some side effects ...

- Tue Mar 29, 2016 12:31 pm #44259 I thought that the regulator was used only for the 3.3v output pin, so if that's not used I could disable it to save some more uA.
So I wired the LDO pin and GND pin, but then the board doesn't turn on (so you're right about side effects...).

So what's the purpose of disabbling the regulator if it power off the whole board?
Am I missing something?

My board stays on deep sleep most of the time, so I want to reduce the power to the minimum during deep sleep, and I thought that since we are talking of uA, turning off the regulator would save some too.