Introduction
I was looking to buy some more ESP8266 boards and my attention was attracted by an ESP8266 ESP-12F NODEMCU Wemos Development Board CP2102 + 0.96” OLED for £5.50. This looked to be an ESP8266 with a small OLED display. I have noticed NODEMCU and Lua before and thought I would try it out. There is a great attraction in having a display on your MCU rather than arsing around with LEDs all the time.
A quick investigation told me that NODEMCU is firmware written
to allow eLua programs to be loaded onto ESP8266 boards. Lua is a language developed in Brazil as a
small, fast, simple interpreter which is suitable for embedded systems. It is written in ANSI C and has a C API,
programs are compiled into bytecode then run on a processor.
In fact the nodemcu firmware is compatible with the Arduino
IDE so you can write Arduino ESP8266 sketches and run them on a the board.
The other nice feature of the development board is that I don’t
have to press reset / flash buttons to load programs. This saves a huge amount of irritation.
Installation
The board plugs directly into my PC and is visible to the Arduino IDE. It is a standard ESP-12F so you use GPIO2 for the blink program. I found a suitable OLED library on github and only needed to change SDA(D1) and SCL(D2) to run the demo program.
The verdict is that this is amazing, a wifi enabled arduino with a screen for less than £6.
No comments:
Post a Comment