Fixstuff's World: Latest Huzzah news

Ok.

I've had some time now to play around a bit with the Huzzah ESP8266.

I'm pretty darned impressed with this chipset. Again, I am also impressed with Adafruit on the development board its on.

That being said, I also found some of the things I'm not so crazy about.

There is no PWM available direct off the board, which was disappointing. Its also a tad bit delicate, with it occasionally only reading in Modbus registers and ignoring sending out any. I minimized this somewhat by slowing things down a bit, but it can be somewhat aggravating. It appears to be the Modbus library for the ESP8266. Its not the most robust library for sure. I had to get creative on the Codesys side, to not hammer the little guy to hard. I did get it working though with both reading and writing registers.

Since I had no PWM, and only 1 weird 10 bit A/D, I added a "helper" in the form of a Teensy 3.1. Using the Huzzah's I2C bus, I expanded the I/O greatly using the Teensy as an expander. I now have 4 ch of analog, digital inputs, outputs, and a couple PWM channels configured. It's pretty much wide open now with the Teensy. It just doubles the complexity and triples the price. Yay!. Its still only about $30 from a measly $10.

So, now I have a full wireless Wifi sensor node, that can also do distributed control. I can still use just a Huzzah for simple on/off, and analog feedback from sensors, but this setup here is the full deal. I still can use the Teensy RTC, for a standalone controller with real time clock capabilities. With a Codesys Pi "brain", I can control everything from a nice, centralized master controller with GUI interface. Overall its pretty nifty.