A little board that adds WiFi to any project for a few hundreds of pennies has been all the rage for at least half a year. I am referring to the ESP8266 and this product is a marrige of one of those WiFi modules with the support hardware required to get it running. This week I’m reviewing the HUZZAH ESP8266 Breakout by Adafruit Industries.

If you saw the article [cnlohr] woite for us about direct programming this board you will know that a good chunk of that post covered what you need to do just to get the module into programming mode. This required adding a regulated 3.3V source, and a way to pull one of the pins to ground when resetting the power rail. Not only does the HUZZAH take care of that for you, it turns the non-breadboard friendly module into a DIP form factor while breaking out way more pins than the most common module offers. All of this and the price tag is just $9.95. Join me after the break for the complete run-down.

The Hardware

This board is about 1.5 inches by 1 inch… like two postage stamps side-by-side. It hosts the FCC and CE approved module which we first heard about in December. These modules need a 3.3v supply and there is a regultor on board which can supply up to 500mA (the module can consume as much as 250mA) and can be fed by a battery, USB power, or any other 5V supply. As I mentioned earlier you need to pull a pin low during reset to put the module in programming mode. There are two switches on the board that facilitate this, hold the user button down and press reset and you’re ready to flash.

On a breadboard you’ll have two rows not covered by the board on one side, and one row on the other. The board doesn’t have a USB-to-UART bridge but we’re fine with that. On one end of the board you’ll find the common pinout for a USB-to-serial programming cable. Above you can see the programming cable Adafruit sent me with these samples. To the right I tried out my 5V Sparkfun FTDI board and as advertised, the HUZZAH can be programmed with either 3.3v or 5V logic levels.

The one thing I noticed is that the two buttons are a bit tricky to get at with the programmers connected, especially the FTDI board. For the second module I may supply my own right-angle header to get around that. Of course doing so would cover part of the breadboard so this is probably six of one, half dozen of the other.

I love it that they supply the pin headers but don’t solder them. Sometimes I prefer pin sockets or unpopulated pads, and this makes it easy for me to make that choice like the right-angle one I mentioned above. It’s something small but I also appreciate that the pinheaders in the package were not the minimum number necessary for this board — there were a few extra pins. You need to break them off and sometimes they can break one pin over from where you expected. If it were the minimum number you would either start over or solder a single pin at the end of the row (not ideal). If you screw up snapping these you could conceivably use a set of three pins and the rest as one unit to fix your mistake. Maybe I’m weird but it’s the small things in life!

Programming Options: NodeMCU and Lua

The board ships with this firmware on it. I was up and running with the Lua interpreter within three minutes of the package arriving at my door. Seriously, it took me longer to figure out if the USB-to-serial was green or white for TX/RX than it did to connect to my local WiFi Access point. Adafuit’s ‘Hello World’ walkthrough gets you going if you haven’t given this a try before.

Programming Options: Arduino IDE

Adafruit has a Board Manager for Arduino IDE. Perhaps this is common knowledge but I don’t often work with this IDE and it’s the first time I’ve run into it. What can I say, it kicks ass!

I hate setting up tool chains for new chips. With this you add a web address and port number, restart the IDE, and use the board manager to add support for this board. Sweet!

That turns this into an Arduino compatible board which solves something that has long bothered me. I’ve seen a ton of really simple Arduino projects that use the ESP8266 externally. Last month’s porting of the Arduino framework for these chips, coupled with this ready-to-go hardware does away with that nonsense. Seriously, the vast majority of those projects need little to no computing power and will work like a dream when directly programmed onto this chip.

To prove my point, I knocked out this quick binary counter that uses five LEDs as outputs. I’m not leveraging any of the WiFi features on this, but the compiled binary is 174,358 bytes and the Arduino IDE reports this board has a max capacity of 524,288 bytes. It five I/O used for LEDs there are still four more digital pins, the two UART pins, and an ADC input.

Programming Options: esptool

Arduino will overwrite NodeMCU but that’s easy to reflash. I followed [cnlohr’s] direct programming guide to write the binary using esptool. Both this method and the Arduino method are directly programming the EEPROM on the module. This is exactly the same method you’d use if you wanted to develop natively using the Espressif or the Open Source SDKs. Here’s the commands I used to reflash the NodeMCU firmware:

sudo python esptool.py --port /dev/ttyUSB0 write_flash 0x0000 /home/mike/Downloads/nodemcu_latest.bin

Get the NodeMCU binary from their “latest” folder of github repo.

Conclusion

“Buy as many of these as [Phil] will make for us.” That’s what I’ve asked [Julian], the Hackaday Store manager to do. You should be able to get the Hackaday black version of this in a few weeks. Adafruit is currently sold out but I’m sure they’re racing to remedy this.

These are amazing little boards. The price of $9.95 is crazy considering what you get for it. I’m talking about the entire ecosystem which gives you multiple flavors of programming environments. Adafruit has done a lot to contribute to the code and knowledge base here, but a mammoth portion of this is community developed and I think coming in low on the price is one more way Adafruit has chosen to be a good guy in this ecosystem. The board has a ton of I/O for what it is, and if that’s not enough just, implement I2C, SPI, or UART to couple a beefy uC to the connectivity this one brings to the party. I see zero downside on this board. It’s as close to perfect as you can get.

On Saturday and Sunday May 2nd and 3rd  we are travelling to France for Maker Faire Paris!  You can find us in the Intel booth with demos  around Arduino Uno, Zero, Yún and Casa Jasmina. We’ll also showcase some projects and tutorials made with Arduino Certified Intel Galileo Gen2 and Edison!

This edition will be held in Pavilion 6 of the exhibition center at Porte de Versailles. Come and  share your ideas and open source projects with us and discover how many cool things you can do with Arduino!

If you’re not stuck in the tech news filter bubble, you may not have heard the Microsoft Build Developers Conference is going on right now. Among the topics covered in the keynotes are a new Office API and a goal to have Windows 10 running on a Billion devices in a few years.

There are, however, some interesting things coming out of the Build conference. Windows 10 is designed for hackers, with everything from virtual Arduino shields running on phones, Windows 10 running on Raspberry Pis, and Visual Code Studio running on OS X and Linux.

This is not the first time in recent memory Microsoft has courted the maker market. Microsoft begrudgingly supported the hardware dev scene with the PC version of the Microsoft Kinect, and a year or two ago, Microsoft rolled out drivers for 3D printers that were much more capable than the usual serial interface (read: the ability for printer manufacturers to add DRM). To the true, tie-die wearing, rollerblade-skating, acoustic coupler-sporting, Superman III-watching hackers out there, these efforts appear laughable – the product of managers completely out of touch with their audience.

Depending on your perspective, the new releases for the Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and other ‘maker-themed’ hardware could go one way or the other.

As far as educational efforts go, the Windows Remote Arduino and Windows Virtual Shields for Arduino are especially interesting. Instead of filling a computer lab up with dozens of Arduinos and the related shields, the WVSA uses the sensors on a Windows 10 smartphone with an Arduino. Windows Remote Arduino allows makers to control an Arduino not through the standard USB port, but a Bluetooth module.

If Arduinos aren’t your thing, the Windows 10 IoT preview for the Raspberry Pi 2 and Minnowboard Max is out now. The Win10 IoT distribution does not yet have working WiFi or Bluetooth, making it the single most useless operating system for Internet of Things devices. It was, however, released at the Build conference.

Also announced was a partnership with a fabulous hardware project hosting site, Hackster.io. Microsoft and Hackster.io will be collaborating with hackathons and other events focused on Windows technology. I get why they wouldn’t want another, vastly more popular project hosting site doing this, but I’m a little confused at why Instructables wasn’t the top Microsoft pick.

As always, you may express your infinite derision in the comments below. Spelling Microsoft with a dollar sign will result in a ban.

Day one of Microsoft's Build 2015 conference is in the books, but that doesn't mean the news has stopped. The Windows 10 IoT Core Insider developer preview (phew!) has launched for small devices including the Raspberry Pi 2. Redmond admits that it's still pretty rough around the edges, but it's hoping that the maker community can provide feedback for how the platform's turning out along the road to a full release. What's more, the software giant is partnering with Arduino for a series of "Arduino Certified" products to bring the ubiquitous DIY boards into the Windows family and take advantage of all that the software has to offer. For example, cloud computing, a familiar user interface, image processing and a ton more. It follows the theme of bringing everything under one roof that Nadella and Co. have been so vocal about lately, and should hopefully help tinkerers develop some pretty powerful stuff in their garage.

Source: Windows Blog, Steve Troughton-Smith (Twitter) (1), (2)

Day one of Microsoft's Build 2015 conference is in the books, but that doesn't mean the news has stopped. The Windows 10 IoT Core Insider developer preview (phew!) has launched for small devices including the Raspberry Pi 2. Redmond admits that it's still pretty rough around the edges, but it's hoping that the maker community can provide feedback for how the platform's turning out along the road to a full release. What's more, the software giant is partnering with Arduino for a series of "Arduino Certified" products to bring the ubiquitous DIY boards into the Windows family and take advantage of all that the software has to offer. For example, cloud computing, a familiar user interface, image processing and a ton more. It follows the theme of bringing everything under one roof that Nadella and Co. have been so vocal about lately, and should hopefully help tinkerers develop some pretty powerful stuff in their garage.

Filed under: Desktops, Microsoft

Comments

Source: Windows Blog, Steve Troughton-Smith (Twitter) (1), (2)

It’s a special day for the Makers’ community. Massimo Banzi is in San Francisco attending Build Conference, the biggest developer event of the calendar year for Microsoft and today Microsoft is  announcing a strong partnership with Arduino: Windows 10 is in fact the world’s first Arduino certified operating system!

‘Arduino Certified’  Windows 10 enables makers to easily create smart objects combining hardware-driving capability of Arduino with the software capabilities of Windows.

For example, a security camera can be built by using Arduino to power the motors controls to tilt/turn the camera and using Universal Windows Platform (UWP) to create great UI, to connect the camera to the cloud, to process the image for motion detection and for adding facial/voice recognition.

The makers’ community can now also enjoy Windows Remote Arduino and Windows Virtual Shields for Arduino technologies – both released as open source libraries.

With Windows Remote Arduino developers can (wirelessly) access the capabilities of  Windows 10 devices as if they were physically attached to an Arduino Shield and leveraging Arduino functions directly from Universal Windows Application.

In this way Microsoft is enabling developers to extend their Universal Windows Platform Application with Arduino commands (that execute on a wirelessly connected Arduino device). Combining the power of Windows 10 devices including features such as Image processing, Speech recognition, Website parsing, Cameras and Advanced Audio pipelines with the power of physical world interactivity through Arduino enables incredible new scenarios to be created. Take a look at this Basic Windows Remote Arduino project to learn how to leverage this technology in any interactive project.

With Windows Virtual Shields for Arduino, users can tap into the incredible power of their Windows 10 devices through wireless protocols. For example Lumia 530 contains a lot of Arduino Shield capabilities and allows designers/makers to connect all those components seamlessly. Imagine being able to create an Arduino project that includes GPS, Web connectivity/parsing, touch display, speech technologies and more! Take a look at this Picture the Weather project created to bring children’s drawings to life!

Arduino is really happy that Microsoft got inspired by the enthusiasm and passion for technology represented by the Maker community and we look forward to see the amazing projects opening up from this unique offering.

There are plenty of GPS navigation units on the market today, but it’s always fun to build something yourself. That’s what [middelbeek] did with his $25 GPS device. He managed to find a few good deals on electronics components online, including and Arduino Uno, a GPS module, and a TFT display.

In order to get the map images on the device, [middelbeek] has to go through a manual process. First he has to download a GEOTIFF of the area he wants mapped. A GEOTIFF is a metadata standard that allows georeferencing information to be embedded into a TIFF image file.  [middelbeek] then has to convert the GEOTIFF into an 8-bit BMP image file. The BMP images get stored on an SD card along with a .dat file that describes the boundaries of each BMP. The .dat file was also manually created.

The Arduino loads this data and displays the correct map onto the 320×240 TFT display. [middelbeek] explains on his github page that he is currently unable to display data from two map files at once, which can lead to problems when the position moves to the edge of the map. We suspect that with some more work and tuning this system could be improved and made easier to use, of course for under $25 you can’t expect too much.

With the release of Arduino 1.6.2 we turned a page in the history of Arduino:  The “old” IDE 1.0.x is replaced by a more modern and more modular development environment which introduced a lot of usability improvements for Makers.

The community responded energetically to these new features by packaging up cores for other processors and boards that are not officially supported by Arduino. There is so much cool stuff being done out there that we figured out we wanted to make them available to the whole Arduino community.

We want a more open Arduino development environment where the community contribution can be made available more easily to all the users alongside the officially supported code.

To do this we are adding new features in the next release of the Arduino IDE that will allow adding community contributed cores just by adding a line to the IDE configuration. This will allow these community contributions to be made available simply and quickly. In the future we’ll also make it possible for those contributions to be hosted on our servers for quicker deployment.

We also decided to get rid of the popup notifying users they were using a non-certified board. Our issues with a specific manufacturer are now well known in the community that the popup just got in the way our desire to be more open and making life simpler for people. This change is already active in the current Arduino IDE.

A lot of people use boards that do not contribute back to Arduino and, honestly, we rather work with whoever wants to positively collaborate with us rather than annoy people.
We have added a “donation” option for the people who would like to contribute to the development and support of the whole Arduino ecosystem. When you download the IDE you’ll be asked if you want to donate, you can skip it or chose an amount.

In roughly 6 weeks we had more than 1 million downloads of the Arduino IDE: it’s an amazing number that we want to see grow constantly so if you appreciate what we do you can support our work directly even if your board manufacturers don’t.

This is just the beginning of a new phase where we want to make the Arduino IDE truly everybody’s development environment.

In the meantime if you have suggestions on how to further open up Arduino please post a comment!

Massimo Banzi

An Arduino Uno appeared at The Tonight Show thanks to a project called Wildfire Warning System created by a 14 years old girl from California. Take a look at the video to discover how  you can detect fires  using a gas sensor and a temperature sensor.

And guess what? Jimmy Fallon knows what an Arduino is! Watch the video:

We featured Nikodem’s bike tachometer last September on this blog. He’s now sharing with us another DIY project called DIY Arduino controlled Egg-Bot. It’s a DIY version of the original Egg-bot created by Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories.

You can follow the step-by-step tutorial on Instructables and here’s a preview of the bill of materials you’ll need to make the project at home:

– Stepper motor with 200 steps per revolution (x2)  / I use 12V and 0,33A but you can use other.
– Stepper motor driver A4988 (x2)
– Arduino Uno
– Power supply for stepper
– Micro servo
– Plastic plate, wood
– 40cm screws x3 and 12 nuts for it’s
– Two Lego wheels
– Markers in different colors
– Drill, knife, saw, screwdriver, double sided tape, wood glue, wire, soldering iron, rubber bands
– Everything you need to make PCB