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Tutorial 9: ESP8266 and WS2812B RGB LED (or NeoPixel) ring

Posted on May 18, 2017 by R-B Leave a comment

This tutorial describes how to interface a WS2812B RGB LED ring or Adafruit’s NeoPixel ring to ESP8266. The WS2812B is a smart RGB LED with a control circuit integrated in a 5050 SMD package. The RGB data transfer occurs through a single data input line using single NZR communication mode. Connection between the NeoPixel ring and ESP8266 is through a single data wire. I am using EasyESP-1 here for illustration. The Data In (DI) line of the NeoPixel ring connects to D1 pin of EasyESP-1. VCC and GND pins go to 3.3V and GND terminals of EasyESP-1. I used a 40 RGB LED NeoPixel-compatible LED

Starting STM8 Microcontrollers

Posted on April 24, 2017 by Shawon Shahryiar 298 comments

STM8 microcontrollers are 8-bit general purpose microcontrollers from STMicroelectronics (STM). STM is famous mainly for its line of 32-bit ARM Cortex microcontrollers – the STM32s. STM8 microcontrollers are rarely discussed in that context. However, STM8 MCUs are robust and most importantly they come packed with lots of hardware features. Except for the ARM core, 32-bit architecture, performance and some minor differences, STM8s have many peripheral similarities with STM32s. In my opinion, STM8s are equally or sometimes more matched than the popular PICs and AVRs in all areas. Unlike PICs and AVRs however, I have seen STM8s mostly in various SMD

Tutorial 7: ESP8266 and ILI9341 TFT LCD

Posted on February 7, 2017 by R-B 3 comments

In tutorial 3, we discussed how to use an SSD1306-driven I2C OLED screen with EasyESP-1 for displaying basic text and graphics. We used a 0.96″ (along the diagonal) 128×64 monochrome pixels OLED display for illustration. Despite its small size, the readability was pretty good due to its high contrast, which makes it a very good, compact size display for general applications. The excitement of having a display screen in an ESP8266 project can be further enhanced by upgrading the choice of display to colorful TFT LCD. One such screen that is readily available in the market at affordable price is ILI9341

Tutorial 5: Setting up an ESP8266 Web Server

Posted on February 3, 2017 by R-B Leave a comment

In this tutorial, we will explore how to setup an ESP8266 web server to serve an webpage that can be displayed on a client’s browser. The client can be any other computer, smartphone, or tablet connected to the same WiFi network. The webpage will also provide an user interface to allow you to toggle an I/O pin of the ESP8266 hardware. Hardware Setup There is nothing much to do in the hardware setup of this experiment. In your EasyESP-1 board, all you need to do is to connect the LD1 pin to D1 pin using a jumper cable. This will connect the

Tutorial 4: Working with ESP8266 WiFi Scan Class

Posted on February 3, 2017 by R-B One comment

Working with ESP8266 WiFi functionality using Arduino IDE has been made surprisingly simple by the availability of the versatile ESP8266WiFi library that allows user to configure the ESP8266 as a WiFi network scanner, a WiFi station (connected to a WiFi network), a soft access point (creating it’s own WiFi network), etc. In this tutorial, we will explore the features of the Scan Class of the ESP8266WiFi library. The Scan Class allows you to scan and list the available WiFi networks in the range. In order to try this feature, open an example code from File->Examples->ESP8266WiFi->WiFiScan. In the example code, int n = WiFi.scanNetworks(); returns the

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