# ESP8266 Wifi Board



## fritz42_male (May 5, 2009)

Hi all,
I'm sure some of you will have come across the ESP8266 Wifi unit. These are incredible little devices that look as if they would be ideal for wifi enabled prop controllers controlled via a smartphone or whatever. They cost as little as US$4 each although the ones I like are on an adapter board with USB built in and cost a hefty $6.50.

Plenty of support on the web for them.

I'll be looking at doing a howto sometime after Halloween if anybody is interested.
Fritz


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## halstaff (Nov 18, 2009)

I'd be very interested in seeing it. This will be something to look forward to after the Halloween fun is over!


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## toozie21 (Aug 23, 2012)

There are a couple of threads and a new board utilizing these over on some of the Christmas sites.


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## fritz42_male (May 5, 2009)

Yes, I'm amazed that nobody has adapted them for Halloween use already!

I can't get over how cheap stuff like this is now.


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## David_AVD (Nov 9, 2012)

I bought a couple of the ESP8266 boards ages ago, but only got around to playing with them last week. There's plenty of sketches to get you started.

Using one as a simple prop controller is something I'm interested in too. Being able to log into each prop and adjust settings, manually trigger it, etc would be great.

I'm not sure how much processing power they have compared to a small ATmega328 based Arduino, but a wi-fi version of the four banger could be interesting.


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## corey872 (Jan 10, 2010)

Last winter, I grabbed a couple of these to play with, too. Thinking it might make for some interesting indoor / winter experiment time. Then spring came early and they've been on the bench since!

Just glancing around, it does seem like they would be a neat controller and as mentioned, you can interface over wi-fi, so any computer, cell phone, etc can 'log in' and control the action or gather information. 

The one downside I see is the 8266 unit draws ~300mA IIRC, plus what ever project you have it attached to. So that starts to get a little large for a small battery project, but even a small 'wall wart' or larger set of batteries could run it for an acceptable amount of time.


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## David_AVD (Nov 9, 2012)

Yes, the current draw would limit it to mainly mains powered applications. I haven't checked to see if you can shutdown the wi-fi part to save most of that power.

One possibility is to use the wi-fi to configure it but only enable it (via a button for example) during that process.


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## David_AVD (Nov 9, 2012)

One thing I was thinking about was a relay banger where you could upload the sequence and change the settings via a web interface.

I think leaving the audio playback to a dedicated mp3 module and leaving the sound files on a removable micro SD card would be easiest.

I'm assuming that banger users normally only change the audio infrequently but tweak the sequence a heap of times?


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