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Comment by gmiller123456 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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.

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