These modules really have the potential to be useful and they’re inexpensive. Even better is that they have a built in processor and their form factor is perfect for many home-automation applications.
I’ll do a presentation and demonstration of how to get started with these modules.
I will even have a limited number of the modules to give away for people who are keen to get started right away.
Just have a Serial Terminal software installed on your notebook.
I’ve definitely managed to get through the basics of getting the modules working. But as a whole, these modules are new in the marketplace and there’s still scope for lots of improvements.
I’m planning to show:
Module Overview - why they’re so much fun (and potentially useful).
Wiring Overview - How to wire them up so they will work
Connecting to the modules - Connect via Serial to the Module
TCP/Servers and Clients
Control from your Arduino
Preparing the Software Development Framework (on Linux)
That’s all I could think of to start with. It’s much easier to have the modules in front of you and working than to learn from the Internet which can be a very hit-and-miss process as I discovered. Being part of the Workshop will save anyone interested in these modules a lot of time.
I will post a link to the presentation on Wednesday evening so people can follow it from home if they can’t make it to the meeting.
In the end, the presentation wasn’t needed and everybody was just keen to make the modules work so we went hands-on.
We had to do a small amount of configuration/soldering to adapt some of the different USB-TTL modules to get the wires around to the correct pins.
When that was done, we set up the serial connections.
Then we just worked from the published worklist shown above using the AT command reference published at : https://nurdspace.nl/ESP8266
We’re planning on holding another workshop “#2” in a few weeks. If you can make it then, we can probably run through the same things again and get you going.
We will do a bit of a write up after the next workshop. We certainly got the modules talking to and through the mhv wireless network. IMO they have a lot of potential but probably more so immediately for people like @clixx_io and @eyal who have the smarts to get down and dirty with the internals and program them directly. They seem to be suitable for both “standalone” work and use as wireless modems for Arduinos, RasPis, Beaglebones etc. Some libraries, or even a simple “wrapper” for the AT command set in C or Python, would make them very accessible as add-on modules. The big issue (for standalone work especially) will be power consumption.