Comment by blhack | Hacker News Reader

Comment by blhack | Hacker News Reader

I feel obligated to mention in every one of these threads the wemos D1.

I actually have a tough time explaining just how incredible this board is. You can program it in the Arduino environment, meaning if you are doing any hobby electronics, you're probably already really familiar with the programming modalities.

It comes with a programmer, and power regulator. No fussing with anything like you might have to with a bare ESP8266.

It also has WiFi. It is the magic internet of things that I swear everybody was dreaming about 5 years ago. Go buy 10 of them. They're my favorite favorite favorite general purpose dev board right now, and actually they're so cheap that I have no problem putting them into "finished products"[1].

Here they are for about $3: (https://www.aliexpress.com/item/ESP8266-ESP-12F-CH340-CH340G...)

[1]: I build custom/one-off large scale installation pieces and hardware prototypes. Almost every single one of them has an arduino-ish device in it somewhere.

I actually prefer the Wemos D1 Mini. The D1 you linked has the same header layout as the Arduino, which might confuse a lot of people that you can use Arduino shields. Some of them might work, but probably not without modifying the libraries for them.

The D1 Mini actually has it's own shield format, and several shields are available. Even experienced people will find value in the ability to just plug in a display, or other device and use already available libraries. Maybe not great for production work, but great for prototyping and learning.

I think the big downfall with any ESP8266 board compared to others is going to be power consumption, even with WiFi off. So anyone not plugging theirs into a wall should do some research in that area.

The uno format is exactly why I like it. It means I can use screw shields made for the UNO on it. Also lots of other shields that will accept 3.3v logic.

I just got into the micro controller world a few days ago and it's overwhelming how many options there are! Between the pi, the Arduino, the ESP8266, Wemos ans so so many more which all come in so many flavors it's really tricky to the "ideal" one for a beginner like myself. The project I have in mind would require to work on batteries as opposed to plugin it into a well. It sounds like you're suggesting that anything ESP8266-based would not be ideal not plugged into a wall. Could you share some pointers to what alternative might be better for very low consumption but still has wifi capabilities? Thanks a lot! I'll keep digging in the meantime, this is a fascinating world I'me happy to explore!

Depends on what you mean by "very low consumption". For one project I used a SparkFun SAMD21 Mini Breakout[0], and with the RTCZero[1] library was pretty easily able to get it down to 0.3mA when sleeping and averaging 1.3mA overall. (OK, I had to desolder the power LED which was eating 3mA.) I've since switched over to using Adafruit Feather M0 boards for most stuff, which is basically the same thing.

[0] https://www.sparkfun.com/products/13664 [1] https://www.arduino.cc/en/Reference/RTC

edit: Oh sorry I missed the "with wifi" in your post. One nice thing about the ESP8266 is that lots of people use it -- hopefully that means you can find details on how to run it in low power modes.

Nice, thanks a lot for the info that's going to be helpful. I'll look into these!

There are a lot of people who've shown how to use the ESP8266 powered off batteries for a long period of time. This [1] references a few and contains another itself. But they're not running all the time, it involves going in to deep sleep, and waking up very seldom.

If you don't need actual WiFi, and instead just need wireless communication, there are other lower power modules you can use like the nrf24l01, LoRa, and other generic "Wireless Tranceivers". If you need them to have internet access, you can create a gateway which the remote modules communicate with, then have a ESP8266 plugged into the wall to proxy the requests.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3lJWcRSlUA

The esp8266 has a deep sleep mode that can go down below 1 micro amp IIRC

I give these away to local kids - on aliexpress $5 buys you a baggy containing a D1, a proto board, wires, resistors, LEDs, temp/light sensors, switches ....

Great value - program them as if they were an arduino

Same!

If it's useful feel free to steal anything from my support page: http://www.moonbaseotago.com/dunedin-arduino/

I'm using a ESP8266 board from a local shop, $17, I knew you can get cheaper on Ali but starting out I like not to wait and not worry so much about quality. However I will look into these for future boards.

I set up a thermal sensor that updates a Parse (remember them!) clone. Working well but sometimes it just stops updating, not sure if it is the device or the Parse clone's fault or a bit of both. But it works nicely for a day or so at a time.

Just a reminder things might not go smoothly with these devices, they are tricky to debug if they crash. When you are communicating via http the apis are not as nice as I am used to on the desktop.

> I feel obligated to mention in every one of these threads the wemos D1.

Does there exist a similar board with an ESP32?

I use the LOLIN32 boards for this.

The 'DevKit-C' breakout boards are $10 each from authorized distributors; they're a little large and you could probably find variations for closer to $6-7 if you went looking, but they're good for general-purpose stuff.

It seems like small power-efficient microcontrollers have made enormous progress over the past decade, and we have an opportunity for the PC revolution all over again. The ESP32 is a little bit power-hungry, but it's also a proper CPU; it has two 240MHz cores, a few hundred kilobytes of RAM, an extra low-power core that can wake the main system up from sleep, and an MPU that can keep track of 8 process IDs per core including 2 privileged ones. People used to make do with less. It also has WiFi and Bluetooth and these days you can even write programs for it in Python.

I'd love to see more people thinking about the problems in their lives with relation to a $20 bin of modern parts. Sensors, displays, and actuators have made similar progress, and the possibilities are endless. But the pool of people trying to realize them is finite and way too small.

this looks really cool! any project write-ups online that show how it can/ is being used?

If you search for "ESP8266" (especially on a website like hackaday.com) you will see a lot of projects using these boards or very similar ones. You can also look up the ESP32, which is the big brother of the ESP-8266 with Bluetooth LE, more CPUs, and some other cool features.

Multiple projects posted if you search my practical project involves polling a remote API to display tram departures

https://steve.fi/Hardware/helsinki-tram-times/

But you also find out about constraints too. Driving an epaper display without running out of RAM was a fun challenge:

https://steve.fi/Hardware/d1-epaper/

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