The ESP8266 WiFi Module sort of snuck up on the hacker community as a "Hrm, what's this delectible little morsel?" item. It looks promising... it's costed nicely... it seems it should be capable... and all the reviews are in - it IS a nice little wifi/microcontroller/Arduino-clone sort of device!
Formally, it's a system-on-a-chip (SOC) that has a TCP/IP stack built
in. It's sort taking a wifi controller and squeezing out the extra pins
and processing power as a pretty capable Arduino-compatible
microcontroller. The ESP8266 can manage all wifi networking, or pass
that onto another processor to do. As it is, it come preloaded with an
AT command set, so you can use any microcontroller to set all necessary
communication parameters through simple serial connections.
To manage this wifi magic, the ESP8266 uses an 80MHz 32-bit
processor, with power to spare to drive other functions besides Wifi. It
offers 16 GPIO pins, 64kB instruction RAM and 96kB of data RAM besides
the 4MB external flash. This means there's little more you have to add
to it to have the ESP8266 monitor sensors and toggle I/O lines (using
3.3V logic levels).
Note: The ESP8266 Module is not capable of 5-3V logic shifting and will require an external Logic Level Converter. Please do not power it directly from your 5V development board.
Specifications
- Model ESP-12F AP+STA
- 4MB Flash
- 3.0 ~ 3.6V (recommendation 3.3V)
- 80mA Nominal working current
- FCC / CE / TELEC Certifications
- 802.11 b / g / n
- 2.4GHz-2.5GHz (2400M-2483.5M), PCB trace antenna
- UART / HSPI / I2C / I2S / Ir Remote Control / GPIO / PWM
- 24 x 16mm PCB, 2x8 catellated connections
- Operating temperature: -40°C ~ 125°C
Links
