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ESP8622 New Year's sale - Perfect companion for any Propeller project — Parallax Forums

ESP8622 New Year's sale - Perfect companion for any Propeller project

mindrobotsmindrobots Posts: 6,506
edited 2016-01-01 16:38 in General Discussion
ITEAD Studio is having a big sale on ESP8266 boards. - plus now through Jan 3rd, you get an extra 10% off.

These can be used in a number of different ways to give inexpensive WiFi access to your Propeller (or BASIC Stamp) project. They even have a board in an XBee footprint which I had never seen before.

I'm not affiliated with ITEAD, just passing along some savings. If it is wrong, please sink me.

Comments

  • localrogerlocalroger Posts: 3,451
    I was ready to go "piffle," but $1.99 for an ESP-01 really is a great price.
  • David BetzDavid Betz Posts: 14,516
    Has anyone tried hooking an ESP8266 to a Propeller? I've been working on a Propeller loader that runs on the ESP8266 and can load programs received over an HTTP connection. Has anyone else tried something like this?
  • KeithEKeithE Posts: 957
    David - what software are you using on the ESP8266? I tried a few different things and settled on NodeMCU for a Sumobot brain transplant mostly because of the RoboRemo examples that used it. I had been thinking about this for a while, but was too cheap to do anything about it until these ESP8266 parts/modules became so popular. Just now switching over from tank style controls to using an accelerometer as demonstrated by Parallax with XBee modules.
  • mindrobotsmindrobots Posts: 6,506
    Roger, you may want to pop the extra 60 cents or so for the -12 models.
    The esp-12 have about 10dB better RF than the esp-01, a huge difference!

    From the Espruino forum (yes, they have Espruino running on these guys too!)
  • David BetzDavid Betz Posts: 14,516
    KeithE wrote: »
    David - what software are you using on the ESP8266? I tried a few different things and settled on NodeMCU for a Sumobot brain transplant mostly because of the RoboRemo examples that used it. I had been thinking about this for a while, but was too cheap to do anything about it until these ESP8266 parts/modules became so popular. Just now switching over from tank style controls to using an accelerometer as demonstrated by Parallax with XBee modules.
    I hate to say it but I've been using the Arduino IDE and the libraries provided for the ESP8266. I just started with their web server example and modified it to call my loader code. I've been able to get it to send a program to the Propeller but the ESP8266 board that I'm using (the Sparkfun Thing Dev board) has the UART RX and TX lines permanently attached to an FTDI chip and that interferes with the Propeller being able to send responses back to the ESP. I have another board on order that doesn't have a built-in FTDI chip and will program it with a PropPlug that can be removed after programming. I think the loader should work fine after that. I'm using the same loader protocol that Jeff Martin worked out for loading the ActivityBoard WX. It uses a second-stage loader that runs at a much faster rate than the Propeller ROM loader can.

  • KeithEKeithE Posts: 957
    >I hate to say it but I've been using the Arduino IDE and the libraries provided for the ESP8266

    I thought that was a pretty solid environment too, and did do some coding with it. I've also been using the Sparkfun Thing Dev board because it seemed like a nice starter board and was available via Amazon Prime for last minute shopping. Did you find some method of not having to manually ground GPIO0 when working with the Arduino tools? The program esptool.py that I used to load NodeMCU knows what to do. I gave one of these boards to a neighbor as a stocking stuffer and he's an Arduino user, so I could pass along any advice.

    I wish that Parallax could find a way to capitalize on some of these products. They are very nice to let us discuss them on these forums.
  • David BetzDavid Betz Posts: 14,516
    KeithE wrote: »
    >I hate to say it but I've been using the Arduino IDE and the libraries provided for the ESP8266

    I thought that was a pretty solid environment too, and did do some coding with it. I've also been using the Sparkfun Thing Dev board because it seemed like a nice starter board and was available via Amazon Prime for last minute shopping. Did you find some method of not having to manually ground GPIO0 when working with the Arduino tools? The program esptool.py that I used to load NodeMCU knows what to do. I gave one of these boards to a neighbor as a stocking stuffer and he's an Arduino user, so I could pass along any advice.

    I wish that Parallax could find a way to capitalize on some of these products. They are very nice to let us discuss them on these forums.
    I did not find a way to avoid either grounding GPIO0 or power cycling the board to get the loader to work. The Sparkfun people claim that is not necessary but it seems to be on both of the Thing Dev boards that I have.

  • localrogerlocalroger Posts: 3,451
    David, I have built a few projects with ESP+propeller but haven't tried loading programs, just using the propeller to push AT commands, for which it works well.

    I'm about to switch to the NodeMCU Lua environment though, because even though it's built on the same underlying functions which are a bit flaky, it's a lot more reliable if you are flirting with buffer overrunts, for example if you want to serve a webpage to a regular browser you will probably get a big header with every request. With AT commands this entire header has to be transmitted to the controller; there's not really any way to discard it. In Lua, you can examine it to get the file being requested and then just discard it. It makes a lot less strain on the serial comms.
  • David BetzDavid Betz Posts: 14,516
    localroger wrote: »
    David, I have built a few projects with ESP+propeller but haven't tried loading programs, just using the propeller to push AT commands, for which it works well.

    I'm about to switch to the NodeMCU Lua environment though, because even though it's built on the same underlying functions which are a bit flaky, it's a lot more reliable if you are flirting with buffer overrunts, for example if you want to serve a webpage to a regular browser you will probably get a big header with every request. With AT commands this entire header has to be transmitted to the controller; there's not really any way to discard it. In Lua, you can examine it to get the file being requested and then just discard it. It makes a lot less strain on the serial comms.
    I'm not trying to serve pages to the Propeller. I just want to load programs and probably also to handle serial output of the Propeller program once it starts. I guess providing the Propeller with a network connection would be a next step but I haven't even started thinking about it yet.

  • rosco_pcrosco_pc Posts: 464
    @David Betz: have you seen this https://github.com/jeelabs/esp-link
  • David BetzDavid Betz Posts: 14,516
    rosco_pc wrote: »
    @David Betz: have you seen this https://github.com/jeelabs/esp-link
    Thanks for the link. It looks interesting. I'll check into it once I get basic loading working. If nothing else, their method for handling transparent serial would be useful to adopt.

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