Recently I have been going to some of the local maker meetups and came across the Wemos/Lolin D1 mini board. The board comes with an ESP8266 microcontroller with built in Wi-Fi, a reasonable amount of general purpose IO, support for I2C, SPI, UART communications, and a USB interface, all for about $3.
The ESP8266 has been released for a number of years and there are development boards available from a number of well known makers including Adafruit and Sparkfun. I purchased mine from Chinese manufacturer Wemos as it came in a small form factor, and had a number of add-on shields that can be easily stacked with the controller board.
In the same order I also bought a TFT display, temperature/humidity sensor, and relay shields. The plan is to use these to learn about the Arduino IDE, MQTT, and IOT. The controller's built in Wi-Fi will allow me to experiment with connecting the device to some of the cloud based IOT services from AWS, Microsoft, or Google.
The Wemos D1 mini with 4MB of memory seems like a good starting point however the newer D1 mini pro with 16MB of memory and on-board Lipo battery interface is interesting if you plan to experiment with remote battery powered applications. The bigger brother ESP32 based boards have a very impressive feature set for a sub $10 board and I hope to get one of these at some stage.
Some points on ordering parts from China:
- Try and buy genuine parts from the manufacturer. There are a lot of clones of the Wemos/Lolin boards but the manufacturer seems to be doing a reasonable amount of work providing drivers, tutorials, and providing schematics for the boards. The build quality of the boards is also good.
- Allow 3 to 4 weeks for delivery. I bought my parts from the official Wemos/Lolin store on Aliexpress. Order tracking once the goods have shipped leaves a lot to be desired but is understandable when shipping is only costing $2 to Europe.
- Try and keep the value of each package under €22 when shipping to Ireland. Above this price you pay VAT on the items. I have no problem paying the VAT but I do object to the €10 fee An Post charge for collecting the VAT.
- Because of the 3+ week delivery time, think about the other parts you will need for your project before purchasing. Create a simple bill of materials before ordering and don't forget about tools like a soldering iron, solder, connectors, etc.
No comments:
Post a Comment