
We made an open source ESP8266 dev board for makers - pcbmaker20
https://github.com/MaloufSleep/ME-ESP8266
======
sowbug
I built something like this but more special-purpose. It just switches a USB-A
power source on/off. I wanted it to control my 5-volt fish-tank lights. I
didn't want to use a 120VAC smart switch for each light because I prefer to
use a single USB hub to power them all, and a bonus feature was being able to
PWM the lights so the fish aren't freaked out when the lights suddenly turn on
100% in the morning.

I ordered PCBs from JLCPCB and components from LCSC. I think each one cost
around $5 in parts, and I hand-assemble them as I need more around the house.

[https://github.com/sowbug/smart-usb-switch](https://github.com/sowbug/smart-
usb-switch)

Picture: [https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sowbug/smart-usb-
switch/ma...](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sowbug/smart-usb-
switch/master/completed.jpg)

~~~
konschubert
I am sure this is something will be able to answer:

I need to build a custom board for an ESP32 which should support low-power
deep sleep and which should contain some additional circuitry (is that what
you call it?) to drive an Eink display.

Basically this[1] board, but a different shape and better low-power sleep
properties.

If I wanted to design this board myself, how long would it take to learn this?
Are there good resources?

If I were to _pay_ somebody to do design this, what order of magnitude would
the cost be in?

> [https://eckstein-shop.de/Waveshare-Universal-e-Paper-Raw-
> Pan...](https://eckstein-shop.de/Waveshare-Universal-e-Paper-Raw-Panel-
> Driver-Board-ESP32-WiFi-Bluetooth-Wireless)

~~~
StavrosK
Have you already made the circuit on a breadboard? If so, learning KiCAD and
building the board from scratch would take around a week of afternoons.

I really recommend it, designing PCBs is very enjoyable (at least to me).

~~~
konschubert
How would I work with SMD components on a breadboard?

~~~
StavrosK
Either breakout boards or you use the through-hole versions.

------
makerboardzz
Cool - it looks like a well-designed board, although the timing is a bit
unfortunate with the ESP32-S2 emerging as an ESP8266 replacement with USB.

A few questions:

* Should the relay have some sort of isolation, like an optocoupler?

* Is it FCC-certified?

* Like other people asked, any information on how the antenna was designed?

I like the old-school dome LEDs. And it's cool to see another project with a
CH340 USB/USART bridge, even if they wouldn't need it with an ESP32-S2.

~~~
pdabbadabba
> * Is it FCC-certified?

It would certainly appear to lack the FCC ID label/marking it is required to
have if it is FCC certified. So probably not. Thus, it also appears doubtful
whether it can legally be marketed or sold in the U.S.

~~~
peterburkimsher
This is the exact reason why I didn't see through my plan to build and sell
the EspUSB (a very small ESP board that fits inside a USB-A port).

I got 3 units built for myself by PCBWay at a cost of $77. I got quotes of
~$500 for 100 units from Elecrow and Makerfabs, but didn't know what to do
with the other 90.

Although I really want this great little gadget to be easily available, I
can't afford $10,000 for FCC certification, and therefore I have no solution.

If anybody wants more details, email espusb@gmail.com and we can chat about it
on there.

~~~
iancmceachern
I wonder how the folks that sell on Tindie get around this...
[https://www.tindie.com/](https://www.tindie.com/)

~~~
tesseract
There are various exemptions for subassemblies and other non-end-user
products. Those may not always apply. However, in practice, a product that's
sold in small quantities and does not in fact emit egregious electromagnetic
interference is unlikely to attract enforcement attention. So a fair bit of
skirting of the rules does go on.

~~~
peterburkimsher
Based on the PAL project and WiFi capability, I think the ESP8266 does emit
electromagnetic radiation. Whether it's interference or a feature depends on
your perspective.

------
mianos
Who has used RS232 voltage for serial in the last 10 years? I'd rather a few
MOSFETs to cut the power to everything for lower power. I guess there is a
specific market for this and it is not me. I have at least 20 of Esp8266 and
esp32 boards around the house. A bit of fun to design and produce though. I
would not bother with the ESP8266 anymore considering the marginal cost of the
esp32 and it is a much better device, learnt from their mistakes. The new one
with on chip USB looks great too.

~~~
snarfy
Yeah, I'm regretting getting the esp8266 not knowing of the esp32. Besides
being a better device for basically the same price, it has better tooling from
espressif.

~~~
antoniuschan99
Esp-idf is amazing .

Esp8266 doesnt have flash encryption and secure boot. Esp32-s2 does though.

~~~
gspr
> Esp-idf is amazing .

I have the opposite experience. Sure, if you just need to adapt their examples
a bit, it's quite smooth. But the documentation is horrendous! If you need to
do anything non-trivial that isn't covered by examples, I found it very very
hard to work with. The documentation barely exists and is written in poor
English. Compare this to the documentation for ARM SDKs, for example! Night
and day.

~~~
antoniuschan99
I was comparing the Esp-idf to the Arduino libraries! The documentation isn't
too bad, it's quite lengthy. The examples, tutorials online, and github issues
in the idf repo help a lot too since the documentation doesn't dive into code
examples too well.

------
new_here
Nice. There's also a project called FEMU, which is an ESP32 Wi-Fi/Bluetooth
board that fits in a USB port: [https://hackaday.io/project/167005-femu-an-
esp32-wi-fiblueto...](https://hackaday.io/project/167005-femu-an-esp32-wi-
fibluetooth-board-in-tomu-form)

------
polishdude20
I recently created a board for the nrf8001 Bluetooth low energy chip. I see
your antenna section isn't fully open since that LED is in the way, have you
considered rearranging things so that PCB antenna has an unobstructed path on
the left and right sides?

------
intrepidhero
Pretty rad! I could see lots of applications. Available on amazon you say?
19.99 you say?

[https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08GY2GTW5?ref=myi_title_dp](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08GY2GTW5?ref=myi_title_dp)

I'm curious about availability. Are they ready to ship? Awaiting preorders?

EDIT: Oh I see 18 in stock. Probably remains of a small run to gauge interest.
I hope it takes off. I'm going to make it 17. :-)

~~~
fellowgeek2020
we have more stock, just waiting to transfer to Amazon

~~~
tobib
Any plans to make it available in Canada?

------
phantom784
Interesting. Seems fairly comparable to the Sonoff Basic (also ESP8266,
retails around $5), but more DIY friendly.

Are you planning to sell a case to go with it?

~~~
fellowgeek2020
Yes we probably design a case that you can 3D print and will add it to GitHub
soon ish

------
moneytide1
Charles Lohr has done some neat projects with this board. Recently he made
this post and I've never thought about this level of hand-holding interaction
with the silicon itself.

[https://twitter.com/cnlohr/status/1307890077041909760](https://twitter.com/cnlohr/status/1307890077041909760)

------
jhallenworld
Is the antenna open source? Is it characterized (bandwidth, efficiency,
radiation pattern)?

Almost like one from here:
[https://www.ti.com/lit/an/swra351a/swra351a.pdf](https://www.ti.com/lit/an/swra351a/swra351a.pdf)

~~~
gramsejr
Yeah the antenna footprint is actually that one provided by ti. I had created
a footprint from that pdf but then I found a kicad footprint somewhere that
looked a little nicer than my rudimentary skills. This was my first design
with an antenna and I am certainly not a good rf engineer. I'd appreciate any
tips and feed back.

------
tobib
Looks interesting. How would I program it, do I need a FTDI board?

Also I wish it was available in Canada.

~~~
sokoloff
It says it can be programmed over the microUSB (just like an Arduino).

------
mraza007
Just curious not really familiar with electronics but what can i build using
this

~~~
fellowgeek2020
Here is a few ideas:

Alexa enabled switch to turn on / off a TV using the IR blaster

my boss used 3 of these this to build a smart sprinkler system for his house.

~~~
mraza007
Oh that’s so cool Thank for the suggestion. I’m really trying to learn more
about hardware.

~~~
chill1
Get an Arduino starter kit and start hacking on some little project around the
house. With a bit of persistence, C/C++ is not so difficult to become
productive coming from almost any other language. And with the help of
platformio's [1] CLI tooling it makes uploading and debugging your code on
chips like the ESP8266 (or ESP32 or Arduino) pretty straight forward. Then of
course there are the actual physical pieces of hardware, wires, circuits,
components, etc. It's a whole new world in which to learn and break stuff.
Good luck!

[1] [https://docs.platformio.org/en/latest/what-is-
platformio.htm...](https://docs.platformio.org/en/latest/what-is-
platformio.html)

~~~
lostlogin
So much this. You can tie in to Home Assistant quite easily. You can then make
all sorts of things. Buttons to turn things on, screens to show data from Home
Assistant, measure things (distance, door open/closed state, humidity,
light/dark, weight etc). The sensors are nearly all really inexpensive and
seem to be pretty accurate. From knowing nothing to having something
functional working takes a few hours. It’s great fun and anything with lights
and sound gets kids involved very easily.

------
elcritch
Fun looking little board. Great to see people sharing these things!

It makes me wonder if there’s interest in more of these type ofESP* dev kit
boards. One I haven’t seen is one with just Ethernet PHY but no Ethernet
jack/magnetics. It’s been useful in my designs to have a ETH+/\- that can be
brought out to various Ethernet / PoE setups. Something like the wESP32 is
handy for kits but not for integration.

~~~
squarefoot
Cnohlr did just this, although he strongly suggests using proper interfacing,
but having the bare signal wires at hand can be useful for chip to chip
communications on the same board. One could build a board with N ESP chips
then connect them directly by daisy chaining their TX and RX pins, that is,
passing packets in circle, or behind an Ethernet switch chip, de facto
creating a board level local network. Might be interesting for some
applications.

[https://github.com/cnlohr/espthernet](https://github.com/cnlohr/espthernet)

~~~
elcritch
Using the I2S is a clever hack. I didn’t know I2S could drive at 40 Hz!

~~~
elcritch
Ah, 40 MHz, autocorrect fail.

------
fbkr
Maybe I'm missing it but I wish there was an ESP8266 board with a proper JTAG
connector.

I have hacked something on a protoboard for nodemcus before, but it ended up
being pretty messy.

------
ausjke
I too want to have this FCC certified.

$19.99 seems a bit expensive to me though.

------
spirobel
the wifi stack onthe esp8266 is a mess. it also does not support the latest
espressif sdk. so you should buy an esp32 module and dont bother with this. (
the price is 3 bucks instead of 20)

------
ComputerGuru
The biggest/best reason I know for using ESP8266 is the integrated WiFi
module, but it seems that this doesn’t expose that or at least capitalize on
it, which gives little incentive to use this over something like the Teensy.

Is there any intention to add WiFi support to the dev kit?

~~~
fellowgeek2020
Yes ESP8266 has WiFi Built-in but thanks for the pointer, I will update the
description to reflect that fact.

------
matthewfelgate
Interesting project. By why no USB? Why does it have a Relay?

~~~
gramsejr
What do you mean by no USB? There is a CH340C uart to USB chip onboard and a
micro usb port. Is there something specific you're looking for?

The relay would just be used as a switch to turn on/off an external device
using higher voltages, AC or DC.

------
iwebdevfromhome
Cool board! The only thing I think would be a nice-to-have is an integrated
wifi module.

~~~
mattgrice
doesn't esp8266 have wifi built in?

~~~
6c696e7578
ESP8266 does, source, have several and:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESP8266](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESP8266)

------
mrspeaker
I have an interest in electronics and would call myself a "maker" (well, I
have a growing box filled with various arduinos and microcontrollers)... but
after scouring the repo and the website, I can't figure out what this is, or
what I could do with it!

What is an "ESP8266 board"? Is that something that is so common it doesn't
need explaining? Of course I will google it [and probably buy one], but just
pointing out that it's not very clear from the website!

[EDIT: ok, after 10 minutes of googlin', it seems no one will explain what it
is - it's just "an esp8266 system on a chip". It must be the first rule of
ESP8266 club...]

~~~
jsharf
Esp8266 is a microcontroller which is incredibly popular in the maker/hacker
movement for it's low cost and wifi integration. You can add a relay to this
microcontroller and put it on your wifi network and use it to switch
appliances on/off from the internet quite easily. If you read hackaday, you'll
run into esp8266 projects regularly.

It's a bit harder to get started with than your average arduino project. If
you want, you can use the Arduino IDE which hides a lot of the complexities.
But the docs from espressif are aimed more at the firmware engineer crowd, so
if you want to get serious there's more of a learning curve (IE nvflash
partitions, understanding what a bootloader is, etc). Also, you'll probably
end up getting into freertos at some point, which further complicates things.
But it's a super great module for home projects.

The esp-32 is a newer chip which is similar but adds bluetooth. In general
you're better off going with esp-32 nowadays -- it's got a second core as
well.

Until recently the only thing missing was USB (though there were bit-banged
USB implementations!). But now there's an esp-32 with USB too, so really for
the cost, the features are unparalleled.

If you're okay with things not being as polished as the Arduino experience
(you might have to learn "real" firmware programming), it's really the best
starting choice for your side projects.

~~~
tsjq
that's a helpful info for newbies. thanks for sharing

