Yesterday I wrote a short tutorial for NodeMCU board, and one visitor mentioned WiFiMCU board that has a similar form factor as NodeMCU, and while it is more expensive at about $10 on Aliexpress or Ebay, it is also more powerful and provides more I/Os thanks to its EMW3165 module including an STM32 Cortex M4 micro-controller with 128KB RAM, 512KB flash, a Broadcom WiFi module, and 2MB SPI flash.
WiFiMCU specifications:
- MCU – STMicro STM32F411CE Cortex-M4 microcontroller @ 100MHz with 128KB RAM, 512KB flash
- Storage – 2MB SPI flash
- WiFi – Broadcom 802.11 b/g/n RF Chip:
- Modes – Station, Soft AP and Station+Soft AP
- Security – WEP, WPA/WPA2, PSK/Enterprise
- 16.5dBm@11b, 14.5dBm@11g, 13.5dBm@11n
- Receiver sensitivity – -87 dBm
- 2x 15-pin headers with
- 17x GPIO Pin
- 3x UARTs
- 5x ADC, 1x SPI, 1x I2C, 1x USB
- SWD debug interface
- 11x PWM
- Misc – Boot and Reset buttons
- Power Supply – 5V via micro USB port
- Dimensions –
- Certifications – CE, FCC
- Temperature Range – -30 ~ +85 (operating)
- The firmware includes a Lua Interpreter just like NodeMCU firmware, and you can connect to the terminal via the micro USB port @ 115200 8N1. The company, DoIT.am (Doctors of Intelligence and Technology), also provides WiFiMCU Studio debugging and firmware upgrade tool available for Windows only.
WiFiMCU Studio (Click to Enlarge a bit) Source code, schematics (PDF), and documentation for WiFiMCU are available on Github, and look pretty decent. For example you can check out WiFiMCU tutorial (PDF) in perfectly understandable English. Around 48KB memory is available once the firmware is installed, so you’ll have a bit more memory to play with some features like https, which seems hard (but possible) to implement on ESP8266.
WiFiMCU did have a Kickstarter campaign that failed to reach a paltry $3,000 goal earlier this morning, but it’s probably because of the lack of promotion as I can’t see it discussed on any other blogs. While the development status is not quite as advanced and community as large as for ESP8266 modules, WiFiMCU developers and EMW3165 community are said to work on Espruino (JavaScript for MCU), MicroPython, mbed platform and Arduino IDE support.
You may also obtain more details on WiFiMCU.com website, as well as WiFiMCU sub-forum on EMW3165 community website.
Thanks to Andrew for the tip.
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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