It's Time to Develop Applications for Cheap ESP8266 μC using Arduino IDE

ESP8266 is relatively new and cheap in price. It comes with an inbuilt firmware which supports serial interface and can be controlled using AT commands. Even though we can use this module to offload WiFi functionality from another micro controller or any other processor, this module is not just a serial to WiFi transceiver!

It is comprised of 

1. 32bit 80MHz processor (Tensilica Xtensa LX3)
2. 512KB SPI Flash (W25Q40BVNIG)
3. RAM (64KB sram; 96KB dram)
4. GPIO Pins
5. WiFi tranceiver

Flashing Firmware on ESP8266

In my previous post on ESP8266 I explained how I connected the cheap WiFi module with my computer using a USB to TTL adapter. I had a old version of firmware on WiFi module when I brought it. I wanted to update it to the latest firmware.

GPIO0 pin should be grounded to put ESP8266 into the flash mode. see below diagram. The SW1 should be on before trying to flash the firmware on it.

Getting started with ESP8266 (Cheap WiFi module)

I brought a ESP8266 module from ebay. The whole purpose was to do some experiments with it and understand how to use it in my micro-controller projects. I was not interested in XBee products since those were much expensive compared to ESP8266.

Initially I started with issuing AT commands from my laptop to the WiFi module. To do this I brought a USB to TTL serial adapter.