Further adventures in ESP8266

ESP-12E with Adapter Board

This neat piece of bargain-priced kit arrived in the post from China recently and today I got around to soldering it together. You-Tube-r RandomHacks has a nice video describing how he did it; I'll just summarize my experience here:

• You really want a magnifying glass!
• Solder flux is nice to have but not essential.
• Mount the adapter plate on the header strips and insert in a breadboard before soldering.
• Tin two pins of the WiFi module at opposing corners and solder them first to hold it secure while soldering the others.

Despite all this I failed to solder a couple of the pins correctly at the first attempt; the magnifying glass to the rescue once again!

Frustratingly the adapter plate is exactly the wrong size for the breadboards I had at hand (too wide for a single one and too narrow for two side-by-side) so I had to connect it with male-female breadboard jumper wires. To program it, I found I had to connect the following pins:

• Gnd, GPIO15 and GPIO0 to FTDI Gnd
• Vcc, GPIO2 and CH_PD to FTDI Vcc
• TxD to FTDI RxD
• RxD to FTDI TxD
• Rest to Gnd (momentary, to return to program mode)

Note that my FTDI connector supplied enough current to power the board at 3.3v; you may not be so lucky.