Espressif 8266

[NZ0I]

The Adafruit HUZZAH ESP8266 breakout board I ordered late last week arrived today. And it works. It took 10 minutes to solder the pin headers onto the little board, and plug it into the Mac using the FTDI Cable. Running the Arduino IDE, which immediately recognized the ESP8266 board, it was only a few more minutes before it was running the "blinky LED" program, and a few minutes later it was connecting with my WiFi router, and established a TCP socket connection with Adafruit's server.

Amazing.

There is a lot I don't know about the ESP8266. But what little I've learned has me wondering if it might serve as the one-and-only processor in the transmitter and receiver designs. It has impressive specs: Tensilica L106 32-bit micro controller (MCU) with 80 MHz clock speed (up to 160 MHz is possible), 1 MB of flash, 80k of RAM, and lots of extra processor power (80% according to manufacturer) and memory even though it is running a WiFi stack.

This is a very popular device amongst Internet of Things (IoT) experimenters, and there is all kinds of support for it. Including a GitHub project for bringing Arduino IDE development support to the ESP8266. ESP8266 Arduino core comes with libraries to communicate over WiFi using TCP and UDP, set up HTTP, mDNS, SSDP, and DNS servers, do OTA updates, use a file system in flash memory, work with SD cards, servos, SPI and I2C peripherals.

The mind boggles.

[Gerald Boyd]

Wow This opens up opportunities.

Jerry

Sent from my iPad

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[Charles Scharlau]

I've dropped the GPS module from both the Receiver and Transmitter designs. 

I dropped GPS from the Receiver because of plans to use a smartphone (over WiFi) for the user interface, which will provide the GPS. 

I dropped GPS from the Transmitter because I think that the WiFi module will allow transmitters to use the internet to access the NIST website to synchronize their clocks to UTC. Also, WiFi should make it convenient for the transmitters to wirelessly synchronize themselves when they are in close proximity to one another - which will keep their transmissions from overlapping even if they don't happen to align to UTC.

Transmitters and receivers could also synchronize their clocks to one another, ensuring that receivers always know what transmitter is currently transmitting. That could make it easier for participants to stay in sync... especially at training events.

On Wed, Jun 7, 2017 at 11:10 PM, Gerald Boyd <wb8...@icloud.com> wrote:

Wow This opens up opportunities.

Jerry

Sent from my iPad

On Jun 7, 2017, at 8:11 PM, NZ0I <charles....@gmail.com> wrote:

The Adafruit HUZZAH ESP8266 breakout board I ordered late last week arrived today. And it works. It took 10 minutes to solder the pin headers onto the little board, and plug it into the Mac using the FTDI Cable. Running the Arduino IDE, which immediately recognized the ESP8266 board, it was only a few more minutes before it was running the "blinky LED" program, and a few minutes later it was connecting with my WiFi router, and established a TCP socket connection with Adafruit's server.

Amazing.

There is a lot I don't know about the ESP8266. But what little I've learned has me wondering if it might serve as the one-and-only processor in the transmitter and receiver designs. It has impressive specs: Tensilica L106 32-bit micro controller (MCU) with 80 MHz clock speed (up to 160 MHz is possible), 1 MB of flash, 80k of RAM, and lots of extra processor power (80% according to manufacturer) and memory even though it is running a WiFi stack.

This is a very popular device amongst Internet of Things (IoT) experimenters, and there is all kinds of support for it. Including a GitHub project for bringing Arduino IDE development support to the ESP8266. ESP8266 Arduino core comes with libraries to communicate over WiFi using TCP and UDP, set up HTTP, mDNS, SSDP, and DNS servers, do OTA updates, use a file system in flash memory, work with SD cards, servos, SPI and I2C peripherals.

The mind boggles.

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[NZ0I]

Another milestone:

I just installed a program ("sketch" in Arduino parlance) that turns the ESP8266 into a basic access point that provides a transparent TCP-to-UART bridge service. The sketch compiles, uploads, and runs on the Adafruit board with no problems. While it is running, I can connect to it just as if it were a tiny WiFi router. So I connected to it with an iPhone. Then I installed and ran an iPhone app written by a third party, that lets me establish a TCP socket connection at a particular IP address and port. After configuring it correctly I was then able to send text typed on the iPhone, over WiFi to the ESP8266 board, out the ESP8266 board's UART port, and displayed on the serial monitor on my PC.

This establishes that the core of what we want to do is easily supported by the ESP8266. We can use it to set up a serial communication channel between a smartphone and a connected device, to provide a means of sending and receiving commands and data. (Still need to test the "and receive" direction, but that is the next test.)

Another experiment will be to see if we can visit the NIST web site and retrieve the current UTC time.

So far, all experimentation has been done with "sketches" written by others. Essentially I have done no programming myself. So this could be a huge timesaver in terms of programming effort.