ESP8622 has drastically brought down the price of adding Wi-Fi to MCU boards such as Arduino UNO, but you need to add some cables, and take care of 3.3V to 5V conversion for the UART pins either with a divider made of 2 resistors, or a FET level shifter, and you may not be able to access all I/O of ESP8622 on the popular ESP-01 version of the module. For a neater solution, Freetronics had designed ESP-01 WiFi Module Shield that takes care of all these small issues.
Key features of the shield:
- 3.3V regulator dedicated to the module
- Logic level shifters on TX/RX lines: compatible with both 3.3V and 5V Arduino models
- Selectable TX/RX pins: use D0/D1 for hardware serial, or D2 – D7 for software serial
- CH_PD pin on ESP-01 module pre-biased for correct operation mode
- Extra ESP-01 pins broken out for your own connections
- Prototyping area with 5V and GND rails
- All Arduino headers broken out for easy connections
- Stacking R3-style Arduino headers including the ICSP header
Eagle schematics and PCB layout are available on github under TAPR Open Hardware License.
The company sells the shield (without ESP8622 ESP-01) for $10.94 US (SKU: ESP1SH).
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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They should have used an ESP8266 module with more GPIOs exposed, such as the ESP-12:
http://pietrushnic.github.io/assets/images/esp-12-soldered.jpg
ESP8266 is so strong platform itself.
Coding in C is common or using Lua script programming is very fast and easy development than Arduino.
After tried ESP-01 ESP-07 ESP-12, I would recommend for starter learning ESP-8266 should go to =>
http://www.aliexpress.com/item/ESP8266-Serial-Port-WIFI-Wireless-Transceiver-Send-Receive-Module-IO-Lead-Out/32254810086.html
You will happy with more GPIOs and 2.54mm header pitch!
We were in the need for something similar for the Arduino mega and we end up doing our own. You can see it here (https://sashpi.wordpress.com/2015/04/20/how-to-build-the-perfect-prototype-board-for-arduino-mega-and-an-esp8266/) Can you tell us what you think? Thanks!