ESP-12E ESP8266 WIFI serial port

Description

As you may have heard, the ESP8266 Serial-to-WiFi chip created by Espressif has seen a wide adoption as a cost-effective solution for IoT and WiFi-capable devices. This tiny-sized System On a Chip (SoC) includes an 80 MHz microcontroller with a full WiFi front-end (both as client and access point) as well as a full TCP/IP stack with DNS. Because the ESP8266 comes only in a tiny surface-mount package (QFN-32), a few different vendors have developed a series of modules named ESP-NN where NN are numbers ranging from 01 to 13.

The ESP8266 ESP-12E in this product listing is currently our recommended module for integrating into your own project PCBs. This module was chosen by the NodeMCU project for their Open-Source DevKit 1.0 hardware. The NodeMCU development team Open-Sourced the hardware design, and after garnering enough interest from users around the ESP-12E module, its manufacturers have submitted for, and successfully passed, FCC certification. This represents one less worry when designing embedded applications using this module (note that the FCC-certified version of the module is sometimes referred to as ESP-12F).

Like all ESP-NN modules, the ESP-12E has a small footprint, and even though its castellated pins make it hard to work with out-of-the-box (e.g., on a breadboard), they make life easy when soldering to a PCB. The module breaks out all the GPIO of the ESP8266, and it includes a visible LED for indicating status. In addition, under the tin can, the ESP-12E a 4MB SPI flash storage IC – typically the Winbond W25Q32FV, and all the necessary components needed for the onboard ESP8266 to operate properly (e.g., crystal, capacitors, resistors). It also includes an onboard antenna with a reasonable range (–70~–80 dBm at 50 feet).

Usage

• Although soldering wires to this module is possible, we recommend you use a breakout PCB on which to mount this module!
• We must use 3.3V signals and power (VCC) when working with this module; 5V will certainly damage it! We can use a Level Shifter for connecting it to 5V devices
• To program or interact with this module we need a microcontroller, single-board computer, or USB-to-Serial board
• The default firmware allows us to connect the RX/TX pins to one of the devices listed above, and send AT+Commands to 'tell' the ESP8266 what to do
• We can also use the Arduino IDE to load our own firmware on the ESP8266 (like an Arduino board). Custom firmware can make use of most (if not all) the same functions that can be called via AT+Commands
• We can load special firmware that will allow us to program the ESP8266 via a wireless connection!

Features

• The ESP-12E breaks out all the useful pins of the ESP8266 SoC, it also breaks out the SPI flash memory pins for programming it (see pinout diagram above)