ESP8266 Community Forum

- Mon Sep 28, 2020 7:12 am #88930 Hey there,

I'm not sure if this belongs here or the newbie corner maybe I'm hoping this is not a newbie questions and it will stay here

Until now, all things I did with an ESP8266 was with one of these NodeMCU / development boards with onboard USB UART. Which is fine for most things I did, but for one thing I really need it to have to save as much energy as possible and for that, most people (one example: https://github.com/z2amiller/sensorboar ... rSaving.md) suggest to use the bare ESP-xx chip, instead of the whole development board, because these boards always have the USB UART powered, which consumes energy even in deep sleep.

So I started working with raw ESP-12F chips and this nice development board wich allows you to stick raw ESP-xx chips to it, flash them and remove them again

1.jpg

So in general it works fine, all good.
The only (luxury) "issue" I have is, that I haven't found a nice way to mount the chip in my circuits I do. The raw chips (obviously) don't have pin headers, so what I'm doing right now is stick two 2mm pin headers to it and solder wires to the other side of the pin header (because I don't have 2mm (dupont) connector cables (yet)).

2.jpg

And when I need to flash the chip again, I just remove the pin headers and stick it back on the development board above, flash it, remove it and add the pin headers again.

All this works, but it seems so utterly obvious, that there *must* be a socket or something for these raw ESP-xx chips. And because the ESP-12F has 2mm hole pitch and most circuit boards habe 2.54mm, I thought these must be something like a socket that has 2.54mm on the bottom side and 2mm pins on the upper side, where you can easily stick an ESP-12F on and remove it again.
Sooooomething like this, you get the idea:

3.jpg

4.jpg

But I can't find something like that :/

Yes, I know there is OTA-update I could do and probably that is how people usually do it. Just wondering if there isn't something like that...

* Am I dreaming and something like this doesn't exist and I'm just a weirdo?
* How do you boys n girls actually use raw ESP-12F chips in your circuits? Simply OTA, so you never have the need to remove it?

Thanks and greetings,

Andy!

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- Mon Sep 28, 2020 10:11 am #88932 Yes there are "sockets" for 2 mm pitch pin rows. It's just not a socket but a single pin row, you'll need two or three of them. And then it works quite good, I am using it that way.

- Mon Sep 28, 2020 10:17 am #88934

Yes there are "sockets" for 2 mm pitch pin rows. It's just not a socket but a single pin row, you'll need two or three of them. And then it works quite good, I am using it that way.

Yeah, I mean: I have sockets for these 2mm pitch pin rows. But they also have 2mm pins themselves below So it's kinda useless. I would need 2mm => 2,54mm. Is that what you have? If so: Do you maybe have a link where you buy these?

Thanks!

- Mon Sep 28, 2020 1:21 pm #88936 No, I mount them on self designed PCB's, so there is no problem with whatsever pitch.

What you're looking for is either:

- esp201 (all pins broken out on 3 x 2.54 mm pitch strips
- esp12 breakout/converter board, to 2.54 mm pitch

Both can be bought at Ebay and possibly Aliexpress if that's your "thing"

If you only need a few pins (notably GPIO 0, 1, 2 and 3), you could consider using the ESP01.