Arduino ESP8266 wifi fundamentals

Forums › Gadgets, robotics, home automation, electronics (including wearables) › Arduino ESP8266 wifi fundamentals

mdf

3490 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

#280650 31-Dec-2020 17:25

I have a ~~wee~~ major project underway - a giant clock made out of seven segment LED strips. Lots of soldering:

Much to my surprise, the soldering all went fine and my Arduino code to display the time works well (and quite elegant too, if I do say so myself).

I now want to add a web-based interface to control it, and now things have come to a screeching halt. I have a couple of Arduino clones (a mega and an uno) that include a built in ESP8266 wifi chip. I think I've sorted out how these work in principle (you have to use the dip switches to load code onto the ESP8266 vs the arduino microcontroller).

However, I'm trying to get my head around the architecture fundamentals - what code is supposed to run where? Should I be loading the web server code on the ESP8266, and the clock code on the Arduino microcontroller, with the two talking to each other? Or should everything go on one or the other?

richms

27982 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

Lifetime subscriber

#2628668 31-Dec-2020 17:34

IMO forget those clones with an ESP on them, and just get a wemos D1 mini for this,

If you use those arduino clones, you will either have half of it doing nothing, or else have to screw around with getting the 2 parts communicating to pass data between them. I guess you could make the atmel half just dump anything it gets on the serial port out to the ws2812 leds, but its another step for no gain.

Actually, I would go for an esp32 module since it has got a lot better with its arduino ide support since I first played with one and gave up, and it has more inbuild peripherals so I think you are able to use ws2812s on it without losing the serial port for debug output which happened when I tried it with the only library I could find that was glitch free - not 100% sure but I think that was fastled.

All may have changed since then, but I know that there is massive progress been made on running things directly on the esp cpus, and also the atmels used on those old arduinos are baiscally end of use now, the arduino guys are all into their samd processors now,.

Richard rich.ms

Lenovo

Shop now for Lenovo laptops and other devices (affiliate link).

frankv

5678 posts

Uber Geek

Lifetime subscriber

#2629737 3-Jan-2021 15:18

If you choose to do it via a Raspberry Pi instead, I can help you. I've just set up a RPi based data logger that is accessed and managed via WiFi.

But I'd also ditch the Arduino and just get a Wemos D1 Mini or similar. You don't need the Arduino at all.