ESP8266 Community Forum

- Wed Feb 07, 2018 8:24 pm #73787 I have been working on a project using an Adafruit Huzzah breakout board. I love the features and I like the product. I am ready to decide on a hardware platform for a low quantity project and need help selecting a hardware platform. Is there a table or comarison guide for all the different options? I find it quite intimidating.

My application does not need super high real time throughput or super small bare bones outline. The only thing I would add to the Adafruit Huzzah is a micro-USB connector instead of having to use an FTDI cable. I would also like to retain the dual power source capability with the ability to operate low power (Deep sleep) and charge a battery cell.

Some questions:
Given that I am looking at either the Adafruit Huzzah Feather or the NodeMCU board. I know that there are various revisions and options within those two series. Do I just go with the lowest cost board? Are there other boards to consider? What about WiFi performance, are they all similar? I have developed the code using a the Arduino IDE and the Huzzah ESP8266 board. Am I better off staying with the Adafruit boards and moving to the Feather or are all the options the same from a software compatibility point of view?

Thanks,

Paul

- Thu Feb 08, 2018 5:49 am #73796 https://blog.squix.org/2015/03/esp8266- ... sp-05.html

Quite a few people use the integrated modules for development and then the raw modules for flashing and deployment. Raw modules like the ESP-12F are effectively what the development modules have in terms of facilities (GPIO etc). They have the advantage of smaller size and lower power operation. Once flashed the first time including OTA code then further updates and maintenance can be done over wifi without needing the serial connections.

- Thu Feb 08, 2018 10:17 am #73803 Interesting. Thanks. I was not aware of the OTA flash capability.

Paul

- Thu Feb 08, 2018 10:39 am #73804 Yes OTA is almost a must to include IMO.

It works really well and is fast. I have about 25 active modules now and without OTA it would be a nightmare to do an upgrade. Normally using Arduino IDE one just exports the binary, browse to each modules firmware update URL, select the binary and upload. If multiple modules use the same binary then it gets very fast to do updates.

Some have automated it further by making the module itself look for later releases on a server and then initiating the OTA process itself.

The only thing one has to be a little careful about is to make sure that an update itself doesn't prevent the server.handleClient() being called regularly which allows the OTA to work. That would mean resorting to a serial upload. I do a sanity check on a local test module to make sure OTA is still alive before doing a bulk update.