WeMOS D1 ESP8266 vs Arduino Uno, Arduino Due and Teensy 3.2. Which one is the fastest board?

In this video we are going to compare the computational speed of the WeMOS D1 ESP8266 based Arduino compatible board with the computational speed of the most popular Arduino boards and the Teensy 3.2. We can call this video ESP8266 vs Arduino! Let’s get started!

A few weeks ago, in a similar video we compared the performance of the Teensy with the most popular Arduino boards. Today, we are going to add another board to the comparison, the WeMOS D1 ESP8266 Arduino compatible board. I have prepared a detailed tutorial on that board so you can check it out before we start.

In order to compare the processing power of the boards, all the boards, the Arduino Uno, the Arduino Due, a Teensy 3.2 and the WeMOS D1 will run the same sketch. The Newton’s approximation of PI for half a million iterations. The time needed to execute this task is then displayed on a 1.8” Color TFT display. This way we are going to have a visual representation of the speed differences of the boards. In order to see how to connect the display with the Teensy or the Arduino boards check out the tutorial I have prepared on that. You can find links for all the parts in the description of the video.

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WHERE TO BUY
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1. WeMOS D1: https://educ8s.tv/part/WemosD1

2. Cheap Arduino Uno: https://educ8s.tv/part/ArduinoUno

3. Arduino DUE: https://educ8s.tv/part/ArduinoDue

4. Teensy 3.2: http://bit.ly/Teensy_32

5. 1.8′ Color TFT: https://educ8s.tv/part/7735

6. Small Breadboard: https://educ8s.tv/part/SmallBreadboard

7. Powerbank: https://educ8s.tv/part/Powerbank

8. USB OLED METER: https://educ8s.tv/part/UsbDoctorOLED

9. Wires: https://educ8s.tv/part/Wires

10. Push button: https://educ8s.tv/part/Buttons

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As you can see the WeMOS D1 needed 1.7 seconds to perform this task! The Arduino Uno is struggling to calculate the Pi and drive the display. The Arduino Uno needed 29 seconds to complete the same task! That’s a really huge difference, the WeMOS D1 is 17 times faster than the Arduino Uno in this experiment! For less than 8$ we can get an Arduino compatible WiFi enabled board which is 17 times faster than the Arduino Uno!

Let’s now compare the performance of the WeMOS D1 board with that of the most powerful Arduino board, the Arduino Due. As you can see, the WeMOS D1 is faster than the Arduino Due as well. The Arduino Due needed 3.8 seconds to perform the task. So, the WeMOS D1 board is 2.2 times faster than the fastest Arduino board in this experiment. Even the fast Arduino Due, looks slow in comparison with the WeMOS D1 board.

Lastly, let’s compare the WeMOS D1, with the Teensy 3.2 board which is clocked at 96MHz in this example, the fastest clock speed I can set via the Arduino IDE. I know that the Teensy can operate at higher frequencies but I will stick with the 96MHz frequency that is easily available via the Arduino IDE. The Teensy 3.2 board needed 2.9 seconds in order to execute the task. That’s 70% slower than the WeMOS D1. If we could overclock the Teensy to operate at the frequency of 160 MHz I expect that the performance of it would be similar to the performance of the WeMOS D1.
The code of the project is based on the work of the user securd which posted his code on the Arduino forums. I slightly modified the code in order to use a button and to display the results on a color TFT display. I made some minor changes in order the code to work the WeMOS D1 board. There is no change in the algorithm I just used different pins for it. If you wish, you can download the code of the project from a link which can be found in the description of the video.