I’m building some proof of concept prototypes for a startup product around the ESP’s, and they proved quick and easy to iterate around. This stuff just used to be so much harder! It is awesome to have an 80MHz 16 bit micro-controller with built in WiFI for $3. The ESP-03’s I have been using are also nicely packaged into an easy to use breakout board.
This picture pretty much captures my route so far. I had just heard about Radio Shack’s being broken up when my ESPs arrived. So I used a Rat Shack breakout to test the core circuit, then iterated my design on some quick and dirty home cut PCB boards. Forgive the nasty look of the soldering, each of those boards has been hacked on a bunch as I iterated through different sensor circuits. The end result turned out to be a nice proof of concept prototype, enough for me to evaluate the startup idea. Well, enough that I could figure out I want to make a run of ~100 of these units and get them in the hands of others to do more evaluation.
You know that saying that single men are bears with furniture? Well, for me at least its true. You can ask my house plants which I am always forgetting to water. So I wanted a network connected soil moisture sensor to remind me about watering specific plants. The other sensors on the board are for a project I am evaluating with some friends as a startup idea. That circuit sits, mostly, on a separate daughter board not shown.
Here you can see the soil moisture sensor being tested.
So while I love the ESP’s, and intend to blog more about them – it is a bit of a love / hate relationship. I have a pile of blown boards. The first one I blew I chalked up to my being the cause, but after a few of them I’ve noticed that the chips in the batch I bought seem to be highly sensitive to reprogramming cycles. It looks like the number of read / write cycles on some of the chips internal flash might be as low as 10-15 cycles. Once I have some more time I intend to try thrash testing them to nail down failure parameters better.