ESP8266 Detour

-

I've spent a lot of time recently working on various cakes for Dinkydoodle designs working on a range of moving cakes that are headed for mass production. The Cars, Droid heads and Owl head, are all essentially the same thing, a controller and a few servos. Like most projects I work on now I started to look at the arduino range to for a controller and software, there are lots of compatible devices to suit every budget and a lot of the libraries are well established for all the basic functionality. The car needs some wireless control though which ultimately led me to the ESP8266 chips. Given my lack of recent laser cutting blogging I thought it would be sensible to share some information about this work in the hope that it might help someone else.

ESP01 device

The ESP8266 is a low-cost Wi-Fi microchip with full TCP/IP stack and microcontroller capability produced by Shanghai-based Chinese manufacturer, Espressif Systems. Which is to say, they're capable of creating a wifi data link to your phone/laptop/other device, they can serve html web pages and a whole range of other useful things and are currently available from as low as £1.20 each. I jumped straight in and purchased a few ESP-01 devices (pictured) and waited for them to arrive. Obviously I should have done a bit more research before starting because I bought the wrong thing. 


The first lesson I learnt is that there are a lot of different types of ESP chips, they've had a fair bit of development over the years and some significant improvements. There is nothing wrong with the ESP-01 device, it's the cheapest of the bunch and it's fully capable and functional but you will need a programmer for it. If like me you have a few old arduinos floating around, it's possible to wire one of those up to reprogram the device. I followed this route to stop me waiting on more parts to arrive but the two rows of pins make it a pain to put on a breadboard. If you want to use these devices I would really recommend buying a programmer especially as they only cost £0.65. But read on before doing either of those things.
ESP12

The ESP-01 is an older device, it has some quirks and most notably only 4 usable GPIO pins. The ESP12 is the much more recent device and has 9 GPIO pins, it's also available for the same price per module. As you'll notice from the image though it's not particularly breadboard friendly. If you're incorporating it into your own pcb you can treat it like any other smt device but for quick start you're probably better off buying it already built into a development module. I ended up going with the Wemos D1 Mini which you can get for <£2.00 a time and it has the Serial device built into it. The whole thing can be powered off USB and it's relatively easy to attach your own things to it.

The ESP12 also comes in a range of different boards, the wemos typically comes with ESP12f but Espressif seem to be up to ESP12n, from my view point I've not seen a notable difference between them but newer is probably better right? This website offers a fairly comprehensive review of all the different modules, modes and boards that you can get the ESP devices in. Next up, I'll talk about getting started and the infamous blink led sketch.


Popular posts from this blog

Wiring the Ruida Controller

-
Image
The RDC6442G controller from Ruida This is going to be quite an image heavy post describing the rewiring needed to convert between the Leetro controller and the Ruida controller. It is also pretty straight forward on the old Just Add Sharks laser cutters because all of the wires are clearly labelled. The controller was prepared in the previous step in order to make this conversion process as smooth as possible. The Leetro (Pad03) panel on the left and the Ruida panel on the right The view from inside the laser looking up at the control panel The control panel is an easy place to start, both panels have just a single cable that runs down to the controller, both panels are a very similar size, with the Ruida panel being slightly smaller underneath so it will fit in the hole left behind easily. The Pad03 panel clips into place so you'll need to reach up inside the machine to work the clips loose. The cable runs down the inside of the laser and is cable tied onto mounti...
Read more

Rainbow Puzzle Box

-
Image
This is a binary sequence puzzle box built from 3mm birch plywood, it uses a Gray code pattern to ultimately align all the dials into a rainbow pattern before the lid can be removed. It's actually a redesign of a puzzle inside Loki's box of Tricks  because I thought it would make a cool stand alone puzzle box. The files are available for sale in my Etsy store . ( svg here ) The puzzle consists of five interlocking disks that can only rotate when the disks either side of it are in the correct position to allow it. The large wheel in the middle and the disks on the underside of the lid further restrict the rotation of the disks. The large wheel must be pointed to the disk that is being rotated and the large wheel is in turn restricted from pointing to the smaller disks depending on alignment. Once all the disks are aligned into the full rainbow the large wheel is completely free to rotate and can be turned to the edge of the box and allows the lid to be removed. There is a very ...
Read more

Laser Cut Cryptex

-
Image
This is my laser cut cryptex. It features 28 different characters and 9 rings, giving a total possible 10.5 Trillion different combinations. I took a bit of time developing the design so that I could add some nice features. This cryptex file is laid out so that you can have any number of rings in your own design. The best feature is that the codeword is changeable, each locking ring has an outer letter ring that can be placed in any one of the 28 different positions. Once the rings are back in place the ring locking bars can added and they prevent the rings from being modified until the box is open again. It's a bit hard to explain so I made a video showing how it all work ( svg here ) It took a long time to assemble this so I lived with my initial design choices but if I were to remake it I would adjust the file to make the ring locking bars out of 6mm ply and maybe put some blind holes onto the code rings to prevent the code being brute forced.
Read more