Introducing the ESP8266

About a year ago I put up some money for the Wino-Board kickstarter project, received my Wino-Boards and did nothing with them for 12 months. They are effectively a tiny Arduino board attached to the innards of an ESP8266 WiFi module.

I finally had a play with them last week and after making a few changes to the Wino-Board libraries (The current version could not do an HTTP GET), I found them very easy to use.

The more intriguing thing about the Wino-Board was finding out more about the ESP8266 module and that it is now possible to directly program the module itself using the Arduino IDE.

Front and Back of the ESP8266 (12E)
Front and Back of the ESP8266 (12E)


I picked up three ESP8266 (model 12E) modules off trademe for under $20 and started playing. These devices are the future, being able to program a chip to connect to the internet over WiFi is an impressive feat, especially for a six dollar part.

The ESP8266’s arrived and this is where the learning curve got very steep, very quickly. These devices are normally incorporated within a development board such as a NodeMCU, but if you want to save money, make ultra small IoT devices and make life hard for yourself, it’s definitely possible to use the bare ESP8266 Module.

I hope to add a few posts over the next few days covering how to interface with these devices directly.

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About the Author: John

1 Comment

  1. I did manage to get my wino board to connect to my wireless network after several days of trying and exchanging emails with the developer, who was very helpful. Now I want to use it to go out on the web and get some info. DO you have an example sketches that you got to work? You said you needed to change the libraries to do an HTTP GET. Can you tell me what the changes are.

    Seems like a promising board but sketches and examples are lacking.

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