Networking

The assignment this week was to design and build a network connecting 2 processors.

My final project is a relatively large vacuum chamber for degassing molds and dehydrating green wood. I would like to remotely monitor the pressure inside the vacuum chamber, so I decided to experiment with the various wireless chips suggested in class.

ESP-01

First I tested the ESP8266 chips in the ESP-01 package.

I did a little research on the chips and found a decent tutorial that shows how to connect a Raspberry Pi to an Arduino to wireless control an AC relay.

I spent some time wiring the whole thing up, then began setting up the code to properly interface with the chips. Unfortunately the tutorial is several years old and we have newer generations of our microcontrollers. As such, I could not figure out how to properly adjust the code to get it to work. After a few frustrating hours I decided to move on to another chip and circuit.

Raspberry Pi 3 with a ESP-01 hardwired

Arduino Uno with a ESP-01 hardwired

ESP-12E

In order to just get something working this week, I decided to work on the ESP-12E with the sample hello world board made by Neil.

Milling and stuffing the board was easy (if you ignore the fact we were missing the 3.3V Voltage Regulators and had to wait two days for them to arrive.)

WiFi Hello World Board

For whatever reason the board did not want to talk to my serial monitor initially, it simply kept returning "error" for any inputs.

After reseting the chip (shorting the reset pin with ground) it started outputting real information again. I did a few tests and connected to a wifi network, successfully getting data!

My next goal will be to connect a sensor to this board and get it to send information to the internet.

Serial output from the ESP-12E