Wifi Board
08. Networking and Communications
The goal here was to make a board with which we could communicate in Wifi, because I kind of want my bike to be able to talk to me when I am on campus. A good tutorial can be found here. The first step is to actually use an already available board with Wifi to figure out how to play with different instructions. I will use a ESP8266 board with wifi, but the developped board is the Adafruit ESP8266. Adafruit does also make (more expensive) 3G boards where we can put a SIM card on the board and communicate by text. The first goal was thus to play with the Adafruit board. For that, I needed to communicate with it. I wanted to first download the WeeESP8266 arduino librairy for wraping serial AT commands. Once it is downloaded, we also need to set up in Arduino the librairy ( it was actually done in parallel and I did not us the library downloaded through Github), and I used this link. We follow sinilar steps than the one did to set-up librairies in Arduino IDE. The following website is a good tutorial for all of these steps. I then tried to send the blink test to the board, but I had the following error:
espcomm_open failed
People online suggested that we pull down GPIO0. This was actually also suggested on the back of the Adafruit board. Pull down means linking the GPIO0 pin to the ground with an appropriate resistor (10kOhms is apparently good). Sit is what I did. But first I needed to look at the datasheet to know where was pin GPIO0:
When soldered it looks like that:
Whern I tried again, I had a similar issue. I thus need to put more work on that. Another work to do is to actually design a PCB board supporting the ESP8266 alone. I just need to figure out a board in Eagle to make the basic connectivity to the ESP8266 from a header, and maybe an external power supply.
I also worked on a hello.arduino.328P board to be able to do RF and Wifi. I milled the board and stuffed it according to the pictures
