ESP8266 ESP-01 Programming Adapter
I started to invetigate a little bit in the ESP8266 ESP-01 WiFi board and I hate to have loose wires cluttering my workspace… I demand a cleaner one, hehe…
So I decided to build a little breadboard programming adapter. This is what I have come up with so far:
I uploaded the blink sketch and the programming adapter seems to work quite well so far.
As a little goodie I incorporated a buck-boost converter from eBay so I can attach an external power supply with an input voltage range of 1.8V – 5V and converts it to 3.3V which the board needs (5V will damage the board… uggh. Be sure your programming circuit has 3.3V logic level too!). Pretty nice for testing the circuit with a battery pack either lipo or simple NiMh cells. As a little drop of bitternes though: the circuit draws without the buck boost converter about 30-40mAh. With buck boost: 130mAh. Its so sad.
There is also an encoder switch on this board to pull the GPIOs low/high or just disable this behaviour easily.
A dupont connector for an USB-to-UART converter makes connecting to USB even simpler now.
The nice thing about a little adapter is: Now I can just plug another ESP8266 into the board and can programm, test and develop with ease. Delicious. Onto the Interet of Things!
