Wemos D1 mini review
In this video we are going to take a first look at the Wemos D1 mini board. The new impressive ESP8266 based board. It is very small in size, very inexpensive but very powerful!
If you have watched some of my previous videos you will remember that I recently tested the WeMOS D1 board which resembles an Arduino Uno but uses the much faster and capable ESP8266 chip. Recently I discovered on Banggood.com another very promising board, the D1 mini board which also uses the ESP8266 chip. This board costs $5.6 and Banggood.com was kind enough to send a sample unit in order to test it and share my opinion about it with you.
——————–
WHERE TO BUY
——————–
D1 mini:Â https://educ8s.tv/part/D1Mini
OLED Display:Â https://educ8s.tv/part/OLED096
Small Breadboard:Â https://educ8s.tv/part/SmallBreadboard
Jumper Wires:Â https://educ8s.tv/part/JumperWires
Xiaomi Powerbank:Â https://educ8s.tv/part/Powerbank
Full disclosure: All of the links above are affiliate links. I get a small percentage of each sale they generate. Thank you for your support!
[adsense]The board is very small. It uses the ESP8266 EX chip which can operate at a frequency up to 160MHz. It has a lot of memory, 64Kb of instruction RAM, 96Kb of data RAM and 4MBs of flash memory to store your programs. It offers WiFi connectivity, Over the Air updates and much more. The D1 mini board offers 11 GPIO pins and one analog input. Despite its small size many shields are being developed for this board which I think is great, since this way we can easily build great Internet of Things projects! Of course we can program this board using the Arduino IDE.
The board despite its small size it outperforms all the other Arduino compatible boards in performance. I have performed a comparison between the ESP8266 and Arduino, you can check it by clicking in this card. This board is 17 times faster than an Arduino Uno! It also outperforms the fastest Arduino board, the Arduino Due. All that, with a cost of less than $6! Impressive.
As you can see, we now have a great new board to build projects with it. It is very small in size, very powerful, and it has a very low cost. This board will enable us to build great Internet of Things projects. I plan to build a lot of projects with this board. For a start, I am going to combine this small board with a DHT22 temperature and humidity sensor in order to log weather data in an online database. The cost of a project like this is going to be less than $10! I would love to know you opinion about this board. What do you plan to build with this board? Please post your comments or ideas in the comments section below. Thanks!
In order to use the Wemos D1 mini board, you have to download an add-on for the Arduino IDE. Go to File -> Preferences and enter this link here.
http://arduino.esp8266.com/stable/package_esp8266com_index.json
I copied this link from the WeMos website. Then go to Tools -> Board and load the Boards Manager. Then all you have to do is to download the file for the ESP8266 boards. After that you can select the WeMos D1 Mini board and you are ready to use it. Let’s try the board. Let’s upload the standard blink program. We have to go to File -> Examples -> Basics -> Blink in order to load the program. We then make a slight modification to the program. The LED on the D1 mini board is connected to digital pin 4 and not 13 as it is in standard Arduino boards. So, in this line of code, instead of 13 we have to enter D4. That’s it, if we now upload the program to the board we can see that it is working fine. From that example you can see, that most programs already developed for Arduino can work with the D1 mini board with minor changes in pin numbers. That also means the most libraries for Arduino won’t work for this board out of the box. The developers must update them in order to work with the ESP8266 chip. Luckily since the ESP8266 chip is very popular, the most popular libraries for Arduino already work fine with the ESP8266 chip.
——————–
LIBRARIES
——————–
OLED Display Library: https://github.com/squix78/esp8266-oled-ssd1306
——————–
CODE OF THE PROJECT
——————–
SUBSCRIBE ON YOUTUBE
——————–
Never miss a video: Subscribe to educ8s.tv
weahermap want give me my location
Oddly, I really thought this might be a good substitute for the Particle Photon. The $5 price tag is great and getting OTA to work was pretty easy, but it doesn’t remember that it is connected to a particular wifi network once the sketch is closed – or if it looses power. So you have to run the OTA_LED sketch again, then it shows up again in the ports menu to connect to. Pain@!
Doesn’t compile. ThingPulse/esp8266-oled-ssd1306 must have updated since then as nothing that I found using this library works.