Wemos D1 Mini Pro

[Julian Knight]

Hi all, don't know if this is of interest but I've just received two Wemos D1 Mini Pro's from China.

They have 16M of memory instead of the standard 4M but are the same size though a little lighter (2.5g instead of 10g!), everything else seems the same. Currently £4.17+pp from AliExpress.

I use the Arduino IDE which hasn't yet caught up - I've just raised a ticket with the devs and they've said they will update shortly.

I've found that the D1 Mini's are by far the best ESP8266 platform to work with if you aren't very familiar with electronics. The ESP8266's in general seem very fickle about power supplies and, to me at least, seem very complicated to get set up. With the D1 Mini, you get a great little device for very little cost with everything on board that you need.

[Julian Knight]

https://www.wemos.cc/product/d1-mini-pro.html

[Giovanni Castania]

I fully agree Julian, since I discover these units I work only with them... Currenty my system has more than 20 wemos D1 Mini (not Pro) which handle my whole home automation system.
I am tempted to order one of those "Pro" but not sure about the benefits... Already with less than 500Kb compiled firmware I've plenty of what I need so not sure what shoudl do with extra memory.
I'm more into ESP32 as it has more GPIOs and even more analog pins (ESP8266 has just 1 as we know) but still not mature and poor support... probably in 1y situation will be hopefull different!

[Peter Scargill]

When you say standard 4M and 16M are you referring to MB or Mb?  I tend to think of 4 megabytes as standard now - and clearly Espressif would agree as they've mentioned dropping support in future for the old 4Mb parts for OTA.??

On Saturday, 29 October 2016 21:03:38 UTC+1, Julian Knight wrote:

[Peter Scargill]

Interesting comments as I don't find them fickle about power supplies-  and not at all complicated to set up using the Unofficial C++ Dev environment.

Power supplies - yes,  those with insufficient power to handle peaks - but to give you an idea - last year I was involved in a project of testing 100+ ESP-01 boards (not my choice) constantly - I wanted linear supply for each board but the guy in charge insisted on using a single 20amp 3v3 switched mode supply.   

They worked - perfectly - week after week.

On Saturday, 29 October 2016 21:03:38 UTC+1, Julian Knight wrote:

[Julian Knight]

Well, good question Peter and I'm not yet all that clear. But they clearly have 4x the memory of the D1 Mini.

As you may know, not being a C person, I use the Arduino IDE not the Expressive tools like you do and I really don't know enough C++ to be able to properly optimise memory usage which means that, with a full set of sensors on board (temp, humidity, pressure, light and sound for example) along with a simple web interface and MQTT, I'm pushing the boundaries a bit. Not massively, I've not hit any limits yet but I still thought it might be nice to have some memory to play with. I'm thinking that I might use some for doing OTA which I haven't got working along side my other code yet, some better OTA configuration capabilities, security and maybe some history, perhaps a better web interface too and some security would be nice.

Anyway, they weren't much more expensive so I thought I'd get a couple to play with along with the standard ones that I'm already using to replace the Arduinos.

[Julian Knight]

Yes, but I remember that even you (and others) spent a lot of time getting to know the devices when they first came out and you have vastly more electronics knowledge than I do.

You know how you feel about Linux? Well that's how I feel about electronics! ;-)

So I've had a few ESP devices and I've struggled to get any of them to work except the ones that had onboard power supplies. I'm not blaming the units, only my shaky knowledge. All I'l say is that I managed to build my own Aruduino's from components and happily power them but the higher power requirements and (to me) odd wiring of the ESP's keep stumping me. Maybe one day I'll go back and work it out but with the D1 Mini's I don't need to as they are about as easy to use as an Arduino - happy days!

As for the dev environment. C++ is still also a dark art to me and too much like hard work. I really can't be bothered with all that messing around with different types of strings and buffer overflows, etc. I can just about cope with the Arduino IDE and there are loads of examples to crib from. Hit the button and everything is done for you.

After all, my day job is full of IT architectures, supplier management and cyber security. Programming is mainly just a hobby these days unless it is VBA or "M" for MS Office, PowerShell or JavaScript for other automation tasks.