Daily Archives: 4/4/2015

The Clickspring Youtube channel

I’ve tinkered a bit with metal working over the years, but never really developed any skill. I’ve always been fascinated by precision machining, particularly those that make clocks and watches. Yesterday, I discovered the Clickspring Youtube channel, which is really, really good. I’ve linked to his video where he makes washers and screws for a skeleton clock project, but there are lots of other videos with different kinds of machining in them. Enjoy!

The “official” ESP8266 Wiki…

This morning I’m still drinking coffee and waking up, but I was pointed at “the ESP8266 wiki”, which appears to be this Wiki page. Bookmarked mostly so I can quickly find it again. But it has some good information. If I haven’t teased you enough with this experimentation, consider these features of the ESP8266:

  • It’s a wireless SoC
  • It has GPIO, I2C, ADC, SPI, PWM and some more
  • It’s running at 80MHz
  • 64KBytes of instruction RAM
  • 96KBytes of data RAM
  • 64KBytes boot ROM
  • It has a Winbond W25Q40BVNIG SPI flash
  • It’s a RISC architecture
  • The core is a 106micro Diamond Standard core (LX3) made by Tensilica
  • The ESP8266 chip is made by Espressif
  • Modules bearing this chip are made by various manufacturers

And most importantly, you can get modules starting for as low as $3. You can get modules with the same chipset, more pins and USB for just $8.70 (plus shipping) (thanks MicroHex for suggesting it). And now, with the ability to program them from the Arduino environment? I’m definitely going to be experimenting with them.

More ESP8266 Experimentation: Giving it the Boot…

Got a chance to play around a bit more with the ESP8266 tonight. I dug out a nice little dual output power supply board that I had got from tautic.com with the hope that it would eliminate some of the erratic behavior that I had observed before. Sadly, that didn’t seem to solve my problem. Luckily, after a bit of googling, I think I see what’s going on.

First of all, the ESP-01 module I have is really limited in its number of pins. There are only a total of 8 pins brought on onto the header. They are:

ESP8266_pinout

  • UXTD — connects to the UART 0 transmit pin
  • CH_PD — must be tied high (to 3.3v) to boot
  • RST — pull low to reset
  • VCC — connect to 3.3V power supply
  • GND
  • GPIO2 — general purpose IO pin (but see below)
  • GPIO0 — general purpose IO pin (but see below)
  • URXD — connects to UART 0 receive pin

I had read that in order to flash, you needed to set GPIO0 low (tie it to ground) but for normal operation, you could either pull it high, or simply let it float. That seemed to work fine. Then, I tried to use GPIO2 to power a small led. It would work fine if I hooked it up after booting, but if I was wired up both the red and blue leds would come on, and it would not boot properly. It turns out that GPIO2 must be left high or floating for normal operation to occur.

This article explains some of the issues. It appears that a 2.2k pull up resistor will probably do the trick. It’s too late tonight for me to scramble around, but I’ll try it tomorrow.