Hey all, New user here and overall Arduino beginner. I am currently working on a project that connects an led strip to an arduino and is controllable over wifi. Preferably with blynk. I am wondering what you guys use nowadays to make your Arduinos wifi capable. All the information I can find on the Esp 8266 seems really out of date. Not to mention it looks like a pain in the butt to get the thing flashed and working with correct power circuitry. If the community is still using these modules please share any helpful information on set up and usage. If not what do you use to have a wifi capable controller?
I changed my comptuter. Now a windows 10. And I did not succed to comunicate with a Esp8266 (= to upload the .ino).
I bought an Adafruit ESP8266 Huzzah a few months ago and, following their tutorial, was up and running it via the Arduino IDE and a FTDI within 15 or 20 minutes. You can get much cheaper ESPs on eBay, but I figure it's worth it when starting something new to get it from a (presumably) reputable vendor with a "help" forum.
The ESP32 seems to be the next big thing, but AFAIK it can't be used with the Arduino IDE yet.
PS: if all you're going to do is flash some LEDs, ditch the Arduino and just use the ESP8266 by itself.
I think that nodeMCU is a good solution for little projets with wifi support.
It's easy to power and the library is easy to use.
The ESP32 seems to be the next big thing, but AFAIK it can't be used with the Arduino IDE yet.
It CAN. There are some instructions out.
But I must admit - it's better to wait a few cycles more until it's getting easier to deal with it.
All the information I can find on the Esp 8266 seems really out of date
My vinyl turntable is also "out of date" if I google for instructions which are more than 40 years old.
But is it obsolete, only being 40+ years old? No - absolutely not. Don't expect that something brandnew will give you an advantage out of the box.
A lot of people here and elsewhere in the I-Net have reported back success stories with their 8266. So it's definitely not a question of age being obsolete or not.
WIsterson: All the information I can find on the Esp 8266 seems really out of date.
Information about a product can only be out of date if the product changed and the information did not.
Have you looked at the ESP8266 Forum?
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Take a look at wemos.cc
I think the question of if or when the ESP32 will make the ESP8266 obsolete will largely come down to price. The cheapest ESP32 board is 7X the price of a D1 Mini clone. Sure the ESP32 has a lot more going for it but the ESP8266 is plenty good enough for most uses. I can feel comfortable experimenting with a $2.80 USD board and throw one at any frivolous project. $20 USD is not a bad price but it will certainly not make me very happy if I let the smoke out of one of those boards. I know they've been doing a lot of good work on ESP32 support for the Arduino IDE but I think it will take some time for it to catch up to the state of the ESP8266 core and surrounding community.
Obsolete? Definitely not.
Will it become obsolete in the near future? Definitely not.
Will it eventually become obsolete? Of course, but that could be a long time from now because a lot of people have a lot of time invested into this hardware. Look at how strongly these outdated AVRs are still going. There are plenty of better and cheaper microcontrollers available than an ATmega328P but they don't have the strong community built around them.
Hey all. Thanks for the reply. Forgive me for my misuse of the word obsolete. I was really just curious if you were using different chips or modules for your wifi enabled projects. And what the popular/widely supported method is currently.