The Lovebox is a project I learned about through a Make: magazine article from 2019. A reader notified ThingPulse – of which I’m a co-founder – because the project’s Arduino sketch relies on an open-source display driver provided by ThingPulse. I was immediately intrigued as the project involves electronics, software and classical woodworking. As a […]
WeMos D1 mini Lite…again I find myself writing about WeMos IoT products. The D1 mini series now consists of the regular 4MB D1 mini V2.x, the 16MB D1 mini Pro plus the 1MB D1 mini Lite. ESP8285(!) 11 GPIO pins, all except D0 support interrupt/PWM/I2C/one-wire 1 analog input (3.2V max input) 1 Micro USB connection 1MB […]
The ESP8266 chip is specified to support up to 16MB external SPI flash memory. Yet, ever since ESP8266 modules that actually use more than 4MB flash memory became available folks started wondering how to make use of the space beyond the 4MB boundary. The WeMos D1 mini pro you see on the left is by […]
Catch a rare glimpse of the life behind the secrete doors of Espressif, the manufacturer of the IoT rock-star chips ESP8266 and ESP32. My friend Squix and I compiled a list of questions to Ivan Grokhotkov Director of Software Platforms at Espressif. Ivan is one of the main drivers behind the ESP8266/Arduino project. Early in […]
Here’s an evolving overview of tools and IDEs for NodeMCU. At the moment it’s my personal scratch pad for this post. If you see your tool listed here with inaccurate information please get in touch with me so I have a chance to fix this. Tool IDE Cloud IDE Web IDE Uploader Flasher Windows macOS […]
I herewith announce a new GUI tool to flash NodeMCU based on esptool.py targeting Windows users primarily. Self-contained executables are available on GitHub. Motivation This addresses an issue the NodeMCU community touched on several times in the past, most recently in fall 2016. I stated that based on my experience doing NodeMCU user support it […]
On November 23rd I was contacted by the Head of Marketing & BD of Onion, producers of the Omega IoT nodes. He asked whether I “would be interested in writing a blog about our product, the Omega2, the world’s first IoT Computer and a $5 Linux development board with built-in WiFi.” About a week before […]
I was recently contacted by a fellow Swiss IoT hacker about a new offering to transfer the NodeMCU firmware to ESP-01/07/12 modules. He created a self-contained hardware setup that allows you to easily to plug in those modules for the data transfer. There’s a Kickstarter campaign currently running to develope it beyond the state of […]
This is just a quick heads-up to let you know that I’m working on a MAX7219 library for NodeMCU. In October last year I first experimented with MAX7219 8×8 matrix displays. Ever since then I wanted to create a library that would support daisy-chained displays and a few text animations. I finally kicked myself in […]
In this article I am going to review the book ”Building an IoT Node for less than 15 $” by Claus Kühnel. TL;DR “Building an IoT Node for less than 15 $” is the book I wish I had had when I started my endeavor into the IoT/ESP8266/NodeMCU world in May 2015. I covers everything […]