- Fri Jun 03, 2016 11:30 pm
#48544
After struggling for quite some time with the frustration of connecting jumper wires to bread board and then programming the ESP, i have decided to spend some time and add some value to the community.
So i created a dev board that has one WS2812b LED, one button, temperature probe, Serial adapter and a USB Port to connect directly to the PC:
My initial goal was to use it during my IoT trainings for beginners who feel the same when all the wiring, but then it turned out there can be other great uses for the design
In addition it also has direct connection between GPIO16 and RST, so that deep sleep functionality is easier accessible
As a result, compared to the Nodemcu and clones, auto-reset for programming is done as proposed by Esspresif - by toggling CH_PD and not RST. Which has an additional advantage that CH_PD is not pulled up by default (compared to the 12k internal pullup of RST) so resetting the board during programming even on 921000 baud is very consistent.
It also does not have anything besides the ESP connected to the 3.3v line, (compared to Nodemcu, which powers the Serial chip there) so low-power applications are also welcome.
It also has mounting holes, and the micro usb port is 1mm outside of the board (e.g. compared to Wemos D1 mini), so it is easy to create 3d printed enclosures to host it inside.
So in fact i created an example enclosure, but of course it can be modified in any way
Another cool (for me
)) ) feature is that there are 4 GPIOs exposed, along with 3.3v, GND (and 5v in the next revision), in one line, so that by soldering a header - the board becomes very bread-board friendly. There are of course applications where more GPIOs are required but i decided to keep it small in the initial release and get feedback.
And most importantly i want to scale the project and sell it for 8-10 eur, so i would start a crowdfunding campaign soon to keep the production costs low. So if someone is interested in this - you can register on the mailing list here: http://eepurl.com/b383J9
Of course there are cheaper alternatives, but there is no way to match the price of a chinese product produced in china in very large scale. This is why i focused on adding the developer friendly features.
There is more info on this project here: https://hackaday.io/project/12063-vespr ... 266-dongle
And i would be glad to get some feedback. I will be definitely making one additional revision (due to the forgotten 5v output), so if you think there is something that could make the board more useful - please share.
So i created a dev board that has one WS2812b LED, one button, temperature probe, Serial adapter and a USB Port to connect directly to the PC:
My initial goal was to use it during my IoT trainings for beginners who feel the same when all the wiring, but then it turned out there can be other great uses for the design
In addition it also has direct connection between GPIO16 and RST, so that deep sleep functionality is easier accessible
As a result, compared to the Nodemcu and clones, auto-reset for programming is done as proposed by Esspresif - by toggling CH_PD and not RST. Which has an additional advantage that CH_PD is not pulled up by default (compared to the 12k internal pullup of RST) so resetting the board during programming even on 921000 baud is very consistent.
It also does not have anything besides the ESP connected to the 3.3v line, (compared to Nodemcu, which powers the Serial chip there) so low-power applications are also welcome.
It also has mounting holes, and the micro usb port is 1mm outside of the board (e.g. compared to Wemos D1 mini), so it is easy to create 3d printed enclosures to host it inside.
So in fact i created an example enclosure, but of course it can be modified in any way
Another cool (for me
)) ) feature is that there are 4 GPIOs exposed, along with 3.3v, GND (and 5v in the next revision), in one line, so that by soldering a header - the board becomes very bread-board friendly. There are of course applications where more GPIOs are required but i decided to keep it small in the initial release and get feedback.And most importantly i want to scale the project and sell it for 8-10 eur, so i would start a crowdfunding campaign soon to keep the production costs low. So if someone is interested in this - you can register on the mailing list here: http://eepurl.com/b383J9
Of course there are cheaper alternatives, but there is no way to match the price of a chinese product produced in china in very large scale. This is why i focused on adding the developer friendly features.
There is more info on this project here: https://hackaday.io/project/12063-vespr ... 266-dongle
And i would be glad to get some feedback. I will be definitely making one additional revision (due to the forgotten 5v output), so if you think there is something that could make the board more useful - please share.
