I have a programmable thermostat design based on a NANO and a NOKIA 5110 display and I want to do the following:
Replace the external RTC with an ESP8266 ESP01 to synchronize date and time with an NTP server.
Also, I want to use the ES8266 for data input/output through an Android app.
I have various doubts:
a) Is it possible to use the ESP8266 for both the NTP and the Android app?
b) If the answer is affirmative, Is it necessary to modify the firmware of the ESP8266 or can everything be done by programming only the NANO?
Any example, link, suggestion, etc. will be welcome.
For NTP your ESP8266 will be a wireless client of your exising WLAN which must have internet access. It can also, therefore, over the same WLAN be contacted by your Android AP which may or may not expect to find a web server running on the ESP8266.
You will probably need to install the Arduino core software on the ESP8266 to achieve all that. You'll have to find a way of getting the Nano (which will still have the Nokia display and the thermostat ) attached to it and the ESP01 to talk to each other. The ESP01 has so few pins that you'll probably have to use the serial connection.
ESP8266 is supposed to have 8 pins. That's enough run an SPI bus that can be loaded with "pin multipliers" (shift registers, port expanders, drivers) at respectable speeds.
ESP8266EX integrates Tensilica L106 32-bit micro controller (MCU) and ultra-low-power
16-bit RSIC. The CPU clock speed is 80 MHz. It can also reach a maximum value of 160
MHz. Real Time Operation System (RTOS) is enabled. Currently, only 20% of MIPS has
been occupied by the Wi-Fi stack, the rest can all be used for user application
programming and development.
It can be programmed with Arduino IDE last time I checked. Home site is esp8266.org.
It's pretty freaking packed except for GPIO pins, are you sure you need the Nano?