Baoshi of DigitalMe wrote an article detailing his ESP8266 (ESP-07/12) Full I/O Breadboard adapter, that is available at Github:
The rise of the ESP8266 WiFi chip was almost overnight with Espressif’s open approach and pushing from Hackaday. While no ground-breaking product has yet emerged, the development on the chip are phenomenon. However due to an unknown reason the ESP8266 modules manufacture seems to prefer non-standard 2.0mm pitch connector, which gives a lot of headache to breadboarding lovers like me. This forced me to make a breadboard friendly ESP8266 breakout board.
The modules I’m targeting are ESP-07 and ESP-12, both having identical pinout but only differ in antenna type. I choose these two because they have all the I/O available, and using same edge castellation (half vias) connectors which is easy to work with.
Project info at DigitalMe site. It’s also up on Tindie.
I had some similar idea the other day. But after a night with some Russian booze I solved it different: just use normal holes.
It goes this way:
– place the holes under the esp-12-pcb, fabricate pcb
– add a cardboard on the top side of the pcb
– turn the pcb over, push in the headers until they reach the cardboard
so the headers won’t push through the pcb.
– solder the headers from the bottom side
– push down the black header thingy
– remove the cardboard
– add some (I used two) layers of kapton tape over the holes on the top side
– solder the esp over the kapton over the holes
worked for me. nice small breadboard solution.
Good idea and definitely doable.
But if you’re going any quantity above 50 the assembly will be extremely painful. My current board requires a hybrid THT-SMT pin header. Making this takes me about 60% of the total time.
A better choice would be going ESP-09 which is smaller. But the pads are on the bottom side of the module :(