I Made a Wemos D1 Mini Dev Board | Hacker News Reader

I Made a Wemos D1 Mini Dev Board

github.com

66 pointsengneering10115 comments

I was a little confused by the title. This is not a D1 Mini clone, but an expansion chassis for the D1 Mini. The term "dev board" is of course colloquial and perhaps lacking a technical definition, but following Espressif's and others' terminology:

  * SoC: The raw chip
  * Module: SoC  with supporting chips such as storage mounted to a PCB often with castellated or through hole pin-outs and a PCB antenna or an antenna connector with RF shielding and often a small LED
  * Dev Board: Module mounted to another PCB that facilitates programming the SoC, pin-outs in a breadboard friendly pitch, and potentially some basic devices, like an LED, button, maybe a temp, accelerometer or similar sensor
  * Burning Fixture: PCB with pins to temporarily hold a module for power and programming, often includes other features of a dev board like breadboard pitched pin-out

Given that the D1 Mini is not much larger than the ESP-12F module it uses, I can see how this is a dev board that wraps the sparse D1 Mini dev board with some commonly used switches and sensors. At the same time, it seems to reproduce the function of a breadboard but is strongly coupled to the D1 Mini in ways that limit future use.

Relay go click. Nice board, should add an LED parallel to the coil with a jumper to enable/disable the led, can very helpful if you're in a louder area and you can't reliably tell if the relay is on.

Building such dev board shields/carrier boards is a nice beginner friendly way to get into electronics and pcb design.

Yes. for someone that sometimes plays around with microcontrollers but knows very little about electronics I feel if this had detailed documentation it could be the perfect next learning step. Who knows it might event make me take an adventure into ordering custom pcbs and soldering surface mount components.

Here's a good 3 hour tutorial for the ESP32, which got me up and running with my first board design: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_p0YV-JlfU

I'm starting to get into it (I just ordered some tweaked versions of the Airgradient PCB, which also uses the D1 Mini). I had kind of a realization like "oh wait, just because something is a PCB doesn't mean you have to use tiny surface mount components"

What are some of the typical tool people use? I used EasyEDA because the board I was modifying was already in their system and their coupon made ordering the PCBs basically free (I think I'm paying $3 for 5 PCBs + shipping). However that software felt a bit unpolished, are there better alternatives? (granted, most of the EE software I've used feels rough, looking at you Xilinx)

KiCad is a really excellent tool, usable for a pretty wide set of use cases, even professionally if you don't need a specific tool like antenna design or complex high speed trace matching.

All of the low and high code board houses will support either kicads project formats directly, or kicad supports standard Gerber format export.

WeMos D1 Mini FTW. So many ESP8266 libraries out there now.

It is a really nice minimal package with maximal software. I recently hooked one up to an 8x8 panel of WS2812 rgb LEDs and then found the WLED ecosystem which installs directly from browser (https://install.wled.me/) and has a web/mobile app front end to control the array, accept button inputs, integrate with iot home stuff.

  1. Flash D1 mini from browser via USB
  2. Solder 3 wires (5v+, ground, data)
  3. Power up D1 Mini from USB
  4. Have fun with some blinkenlights

WLED Project: https://kno.wled.ge/

Yes, but they're going away from 8266 and going to ESP32. They've already dumped support for the audio reactive version due to low processing power of the 8266. There are ESP32's in D1 Mini form factor.

Yes, I was on the fence about mentioning that 8266 isn't great for new work since it is going away (however slowly). Additionally, moving to Espressif's newer SoC adds security features that 8266 doesn't have. In my mind the route forward is ESP32-C3 for low power and ESP-C6 for speed/capacity, since both are on RISC-V ISA as opposed to ESP32[-S[2,3]]'s LX7.

[Edit] Also, I hadn't looked at the WeMos ESP32 mini, but the examples I saw aren't pinout compatible (prolly b/c the 32 has a lot more) and don't have the handy 5v boost converted pin. That means that the above WS2812 project would need to add a 3-5v boost converter. Not a biggie, but 50% more parts...

Support for the 8266 is going to be maintained for the main branch. It's still plenty powerful for running up to 1k leds.

GCC will forever be stuck at version 5.4 for this though

Some of my D1 Minis have regulators that run really hot. Hot enough that temperature readings get thrown off unless the sensor moved several inches away.

It seems less convenient than just using the D1 mini (great amazing little thing by the way) in a solderless breadboard.

That said, still a cool project!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com