Issue 19 HackSpace magazine: Adding WiFi with an ESP32 #WiFi #ESP32 #Adafruit #AirLift @HackSpaceMag @ben_everard
Ben Everard of HackSpace Magazine quotes “Good hackers borrow, great hackers steal” in Issue 19. Well, is it stealing if it’s open source hardware and software? This hold true in adding WiFi to your project with an ESP32 board:
There’s a new breed of microcontroller board around that combines a main processor with a WiFi coprocessor. Boards like the Arduino Uno WiFi Rev2 and the PyPortal let you dedicate the main processor to controlling the hardware, while letting you offload the sending and receiving of data to a second processor – usually the ESP32. Let’s take a look at how we can do this to add WiFi support to a microcontroller. This isn’t for the faint-hearted. Although the hardware is fairly straightforward, setting up the tools to compile the code is a bit of a mammoth task. Don’t worry, though – we’re here to guide you.
Ben has a full tutorial on reflashing the firmware on an ESP32 to make it a simple WiFi processor for your microcontroller, even handling HTTPS traffic. See Issue 19 of HackSpace Magazine (PDF, pages 106 to 109) for all the details.
As noted in a sidebar:
If you’d rather someone else do the hard work for you, you can get an ESP board preprogrammed with this firmware from Adafruit. Its AirLift board
comes all set up, ready to be used in a project. As it doesn’t have any extraneous hardware, it’s smaller than most ESP32 modules as well.
What are you adding WiFi to? Let us know in the comments below.
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