ESP8266 Community Forum

- Sun Jun 17, 2018 4:19 pm #76494 I think your board would be far more practical if you had all the useable connections come out to the edge of the board. You could have done this by not wasting the connection to the useless pins. (bottom pins on the module. If you had all the useful pins come to the board edge then a 90 degree connector could be used and it would not cover the breadboard as shown in your picture. With the usable pins coming to the edge the board would more easily interface with an external I/O signal conditioning and power supply board.

- Tue Jun 19, 2018 4:48 am #76519

If you had all the useful pins come to the board edge then a 90 degree connector could be used and it would not cover the breadboard as shown in your picture. With the usable pins coming to the edge the board would more easily interface with an external I/O signal conditioning and power supply board.

Hi Rudy,

Thanks for your suggestions. I really like the idea of 90-degree connector. I was actually thinking about rearranging the pins. Now pin layout it biased towards simplicity (each ESP pin is routed to the adapter's nearest equivalent) - it's likely that future versions of the adapter will change this.

Best regards,
Lucas

- Tue Jun 19, 2018 7:21 am #76522 At work when I get a new person that is to do some design work, including pcb layout, I tell them my list of priorities. First comes functional, it needs to do the job. Second comes the customer/user. Make it as painless to use as possible. Then comes ease of manufacturing. I may spend a lot of hours on a design but the people down in manufacturing will be living with it for a lot longer. Lastly is my convenience. Of course I want to take the simplest approach but not at the expense of the above.

- Tue Jun 19, 2018 7:59 am #76523

At work when I get a new person that is to do some design work, including pcb layout, I tell them my list of priorities. First comes functional, it needs to do the job. Second comes the customer/user. Make it as painless to use as possible. Then comes ease of manufacturing. I may spend a lot of hours on a design but the people down in manufacturing will be living with it for a lot longer. Lastly is my convenience. Of course I want to take the simplest approach but not at the expense of the above.

Yes, as an engineer of many years I agree.

It is also important to ask is it just repeating something that already exists, is it something that people will want to use, and is it the right tool (since I define this as a tool) for the' job' (once 'job' has been defined). Of course, the 'job' might just be to learn/experiment which is fine.

There are many many variations of dongle/widget/thingamy which incorporate a bare <module> of some sort (in this case an esp8266). Some flavours have pogo-pins so you can pop them in and out of the adapter/pin interface, others have volt.reg and/or usb-ttl chips, buttons, leds and 'what-nots', all of which suck up power that you might not want or have to spare.
What I haven't seen is a more modular approach which has all of these featues that plug together, so that you can assemble a 'development board' from a bare module and then take It out and place already programmed into a final product (perhaps with the aforementioned volt.reg still attached). That is something I would like to see, and which I would buy (I stopped electronics to focus on software 20 years ago, so my efficiency levels aren't up to the job myself, otherwise I'd do it).
We often see novices here struggling with bare modules trying to get pins tied and boot strapped correctly, and I think this kind of 'tool' would help.

I'm intrigued what others think on this.