#HITECH ESP8266 SERIAL PORT MAC SERIAL#
#HITECH ESP8266 SERIAL PORT MAC CODE#

#HITECH ESP8266 SERIAL PORT MAC SERIAL#

Before this, if you wanted to add a wireless connection to a project, you had to use more power-hungry devices like USB WiFi dongles, or squish everything into a serial connection and use a wireless serial link. The ESP8266 almost achieves the holy trifecta of electronics: cheap, powerful and easy to work with.

#HITECH ESP8266 SERIAL PORT MAC CODE#

This meant that you could use the much easier to write Arduino functions and libraries to write code for the chip, bringing it within reach of even the most casual hacker. That changed earlier this year, though, when the Arduino IDE (Integrated Development Environment) was ported to the chip. This made it more of a challenge than many hackers were comfortable with. It wasnвЂ™t an easy ship to write applications for in the early days, though: it was poorly documented and required a dedicated toolchain to work with. That means you can drive it from a small battery or other small power source, and it will keep running for a long time.

And it can do this while drawing a reasonably low amount of power: while receiving data, it typically uses just 60mA, and sending data over an 802.11n connection uses just 145mA. This can run applications, turning the ESP8266 into a standalone module that can collect and send data over the Internet. The ESP8266 is more than just a WiFi dongle, though: it is a fully fledged computer in itself, with a megabyte of flash memory and a 32-bit processor that uses a RISC architecture. Buy the chip in bulk, and you can get it for less than $2. While the TI solution costs about $10 if you buy several thousand of them, the ESP8266 costs less than $7 for an individual board that can plug straight into an Arduino or similar. ThatвЂ™s nothing particularly new in itself: WiFi connection devices like the TI CC3000 have been around for longer, and do much the same thing. Basically, it has everything you would need to connect a device to a WiFi network, with the ESP8266 chip itself handling the complicated business of finding, joining and transmitting/receiving over a WiFi network. It can be addressed with SPI or a serial connection, and has an AT command set that makes it behave rather like an old-style modem.

This is the ESP8266, a WiFi SoC (System on a Chip) that can connect to 802.11b/g/n networks on the 2.4GHz band. In August of 2014, something new started showing up in the markets of Shenzhen, the hi-tech area of China where the majority of the worldвЂ™s electronics components are made.

Hitech esp8266 serial port mac