Wifi adapter for NCS314

[Paul Andrews]

Hi

I've been working on a project to add a wifi interface to my NCS314 clock. This clock is an Arduino shield, so it shouldn't be hard to add that to the arduino right? I used an Arduino that had rows of holes next to the pins and also had specific connector patches for interface pins, so it was not to hard to pull off I2C signals to connect to an ESP01 through a level shifter. The coding took a lot longer than I expected - everything was new to me - but it has all come together nicely. It even has Alexa voice commands, so it is my first smart home appliance! That part is surprisingly fun!

Anyway the video is a bit boring. Just me using barely visible controls, but I wanted to share!
https://youtu.be/K5BNw0LZC_U

[Paul Andrews]

BTW, code for everything is on github: https://github.com/judge2005

[Paul Andrews]

I transfered my breadboard implementation to perfboard so that it fits under the NCS314 shield. The last time I had made anything from perfboard was a RAM card for the Apple II. That worked first time. This way way way simpler perfboard took way too many attempts to get right. If I had a dollar for every time I wired it up wrong I would have about $30. All I can say is I'm glad modern electronics are so resilient! Here's a piccy:

This is partly for my own documentation purposes, so that I plug the right wires onto the right pins! Level converter on the left, ESP01 on the right. Header in between so I can program the ESP01 without having to de-solder it. Creative use of the level converter to hold pins 3, 5, and 7 high when it is plugged in, but not interfere with the programmer when it isn't. 

[Mitch]

Paul, can you post a schematic?

[Paul Andrews]

Hand drawn. Hopefully you can read it. It is pretty straight forward:

The rectangle on the left is a 4 channel level converter. I use this one.

To program the ESP01 I use this FTDI board and this little dongle.

On Saturday, January 21, 2017 at 6:32:39 AM UTC-5, Paul Andrews wrote:

[Mitch]

Thanks, Paul. I didn't put a header for programming the ESP on my clock, so I have to remove it to program. The next version will add one.

[Paul Andrews]

I still have to unplug mine from the clock, though I'll admit that I haven't tried it plugged in. I'm not sure how the programmer and the level converter would interact if they are both fighting over the same pins. 

An alternative is to use an ESP8266 board that has more flash, say 1MB, then you could use Over The Air programming. This is what I tried to do at first, but the ESP01 doesn't have enough flash. Basically your code needs to take up less than half the flash so you can load the new code into unused space and then switch to it. Googling ESP8266 OTA should get you a lot of hits. You can look at my code on https://github.com/judge2005/NCS314WiFi. I left the OTA code in, just ifdef'd out. It is very simple. 

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