I've been lucky to get my hands on two ESP 14 ESP8366 WiFi modules.
But putting them to good use is not as simple as I could imagine.
I found the ESP14 has a STM8 Microcontroller controlling the ESP8266.
Looking through tons of post on www.stm32duino.com didn't help me very much.
I'm imagining the STM8 could be controlled with the Nano by sending a message on Serial.
and then getting another Nano to receive this message with another ESP 14.
I've manage to understand that this might require AT Commands?
dacom15:
Looking through tons of post on www.stm32duino.com didn't help me very much.
That's probably the wrong place to look since it's an stm8, not stm32.
This seems to give some information: Flashing an ESP8266 ESP-14
It sounds like in that case they're programming the ESP8266 directly using the esp8266 arduino core. I'm not sure it they're even using the STM8.
I think the extra microcontroller on the esp-14 will only really be useful if you are willing to figure out how to program the STM8. I'm not aware of an Arduino plugin for that architecture so you may need to use a different IDE or toolchain.
If you only want to control an ESP8266 with a Nano using AT commands I'd recommend you to buy a standard ESP8266 module.
dacom15:
So the entire chip is actually what I wanted.. but without the I/O
There's I/O. The I/O lines of the STM8 are all those holes along the edge of the module. I think there's only one of the ESP8266 GPIO broken out.
dacom15:
and programming options as on Arduino.
You can definitely program the STM8 microcontroller. That's the whole point of the ESP-14, it's like having a Nano and an ESP8266 all packed into a single module, only without some of the support circuitry such as the CH340 USB to serial chip. The problem is that unless someone has written an STM8 core for the Arduino IDE you're going to have to figure out how to program the thing using different software which probably won't be so beginner friendly as the Arduino IDE. The STM8 is a pretty outdated 8-bit architecture, as is the ATmega328P on the Nano but the difference is that Arduino is so popular that tons of people are still using the ATmega328P so it's well supported.
dacom15:
So skipping the STM8 would leave me better off?
Unless you want to learn how to program STM8s or just want to figure out how to bypass the thing completely as they did in the article I linked previously. In that case the STM8 will still be using power so it will make it less friendly to a battery powered application than an ESP8266 module without the STM8.
dacom15:
I'll try to find a way to program the STM8. It may take a while since i need the programmer board. (Unless it can be done through Arduino?)
It sounds like there is a built in bootloader on the STM8 so you may be able to disable the ATmega328P on your Nano by holding the reset pin low so that you can use it as a CH340 breakout board. It's much better to just use a standard USB to serial breakout board for this purpose but I've seen people doing this to upload code directly to ESP8266.
dacom15:
I've been looking for someone successfully using the STM8 and Arduino together on the ESP-14 board. But it seems like I will be the first then..
The thing is there's really no need for two 8 bit microcontrollers. You could theoretically assign each microcontroller to a separate task if you needed the extra processing power, etc. but using two completely different microcontrollers is not really the most easy way to do something like that. The funny thing is the ESP8266 is more powerful and has more memory than the ATmega328P and the STM8 combined but there are advantages to using a separate microcontroller and using the ESP8266 strictly for WiFi.