A DIY ESP8266 Development Board from Electro-Labs:
In this project, we are building an ESP8266 Development Board which lets the user make connection to ESP8266 from a PIC microcontroller and a PC. The board also provides all the needs to be used as microcontroller peripherals such as LCD display, pusbuttons, indicator LEDs and GPIO extension. The PC connection is done by the help of FT232RL USB-UART converter over a Mini-USB connector. Since the PIC microcontroller used is a 5V chip, 5V-3.3V bi-directional level converter circuits are also included on the board.
Project info at Electro-Labs.
I would rather everything be kept at 3.3V, translate to 5V only when necessary. This is the year 2015, it’s pretty easy to find parts for 3.3V-only projects.
Oh, readers should know that they’ve plunked in a pretty darn old MCU, a PIC18F252.
If you are familiar with modern MCUs, then a PIC18F252 is going to be *ahem* somewhat limiting.
Then you aren’t really going to be able to use this as a serious dev board unless you plan to make your code portable to your target MCU. No sense to buy PIC18F252 in this day and age unless you already have plenty in stock.
So be aware that this board is not all strawberries and cream.
Yes. It is a strange design decision to have such an old PIC and then to use 5V for no real reason either. The PIC and FTDI chip connected in parallel is odd as well. A newer PIC with two UARTs and a set of jumpers to allow direct access from the FTDI chip to the ESP module would have been a better setup.
Apart from that, the board seems nice enough. It would have been nice to break out the two GPIOs from the ESP module though.
If you favorite tool is a hammer every problem looks like a nail
I dunno rumburack, I like to read comments that talk sense, regardless whether I agree or disagree with them, but here I don’t have an inkling what you are trying to say… :-) Care to elaborate?
Nice but could be the ESP-07 or ESP-12. No need to use MCU on those models.
I guess here, PIC is the hammer :)
KH: what I wanted to say is simple. If I know some product/tool/way of working very well, I tend to approach any new problem in a way that I can solve it with my favorite tools. “If I only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”
So apparently the designer knows this PIC, likes this PIC, has all the stuff for this PIC, so he choose this PIC to create that board.
I would opt for moving the connector to the border (so it juts out). And I would try to add all the other ESP board designs. ESP-12 seems very promising. Perhaps a small patch field with dip switches or such.
Its past eleven here, so I’m mildly drunk. Lemon Liquor. Might add to the communication problems.
Okay I understand. Now looking more closely at the Electro-Labs site, I guess they have plenty of PIC18F252 stock on hand… must’ve gotten a good deal somewhere. ;-)
I wonder about the popularity of PIC18F252…if you look at the PIC18F252 errata docs, they don’t exactly inspire confidence…