New Open Source Hardware board ESP-PROG allow you to program any Espressif device and can be used as general purpose USB-Serial converter

Created with GIMP

ESP-PROG is USB to Serial converter but beside the Serial TX and RX signals it also can power the target with +5V up to 0.5A or 3.3V up to 0.5A and have two additional signals which make programming automatic RESET (EN) and BOOT enable.

ESP-PROG-C includes all necessary cables for the ISP programming – 7 pcs jumper wires female to female and 6 pin ICSP cable.

ESP-PROG is based on CH340T IC and has drivers for Linux, Windows, MACOS, Android with up to 2 Mbps speed.

MicroPython running on ESP8266-EVB driving MOD-IO and MOD-IO2 relays

New tutorial how to use ESP8266-EVB with Micropython and to switch on/off relays and read ADC values on MOD-IO2 from MCHobby.be

Programming ESP8266-EVB with microPython tutorial

Our Belgium distributor MCHobby made nice tutorial about how to program ESP8266-EVB board with microPython.

The tutorial is available also in French.

OpenFest 2015 is 7 and 8th of November in Sofia

Next weekend in Sofia will be held the biggest event for Free/Open Source technologies in Bulgaria – OpenFest which is run every year since 2003.

Olimex is approved for talk and workshop yay!

The lecture is in Saturday at 17.00 o’clock and we will show what we have been working mainly this year:

“Physical computing and IoT with Open Source Software and Hardware”.

We will demonstrate how easy is to connect physical objects to Internet with our new ESP8266 boards, and our plug and play firmware which recognizes the UEXT modules connected to ESP8266 like: electricity metering, LED displays, Fingerprint sensors, door locks, relays, buttons. etc. We will shop how to display Twitter messages on LED matrix display, how to make door lock with fingerprint sensor, how to implement DO button for IFTTT directly with ESP8266 by secure connection with 2048bit encryption, and how to connect and switch loads and measure what energy they consume.

Specially for Open Fest we made our new WiFi enabled LED 8×8 badge. It contains ESP8266 and can be programmed to do lot of stuff, like to display all tweets with hashtag #openfest2015 or to display what are the lectures which run now and in which rooms by connecting to Open Fest program web page and extracting the necessary info.

Needless to say WiFi Badge is OSHW and all software project sources will be on GitHub (sorry still work on the software and can’t upload yet, we will do this early next week keeping the good developer’s traditions everything to be complete and debugged in the last minute 😉 ).

As you can see all ESP8266 GPIOs are exposed on this badge so it is good also for development board, power supply is done with single 1.5V AA battery only!

The workshop will be about SMD component soldering, we will bring some Binary Watch Kits with us and teach you how to solder your own Binary Watch. These who already have been at TuxCon do remember these watches:

Looking forward to see you there 🙂

New Product: Electromagnetic Door-Lock

DOOR-LOCK is electromagnetic door lock. It operates with 12V DC, when power is applied the door lock pin is moving inside housing, when power is released the pin is moving out by spring.

With SNS-FINGERPRINT and DOOR-LOCK you can make complete access system with logging with platform of your choice – ESP8266, Arduino or OLinuXino.

New Product: Optical Fingerprint sensor SNS-FINGERPRINT adds fingerprint recognition to your next project

SNS-FINGERPRINT is optical fingerprint sensor which will make adding fingerprint detection and verification very simple. Inside there is DSP chip that does the image rendering, calculation, feature-finding and searching. You can teach the sensor for fingerprint images and up to 1000 images can be stored in the internal Flash memory. There’s a red LED in the lens that lights up during a photo so you know its working. In image search mode the sensor compare the current scanned image with the stored database and if images match it sens index number of the stored image which match the current scanned fingerprint.All communication is done by UART.

ESP8266 IoT firmware plug and play detects if SNS-FINGERPRINT is connected to UEXT uart so you can make wireless door access system very easy using just Javascript programming.  We also have demo in Arduino C++ and OLinuXino Python3 so you can access this sensor with any of our development boards.

 

Do button for IFTTT with ESP8266-EVB now you have endless opportunities to make receipts with the IFTTT tools

IFTTT is a web platform that facilitates connections between other big platforms under the form of recipes giving a great degree of flexibility in creating mashups. You can interact with almost  every social platform on the web like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc. For this purpose you make receipts like: If I get e-mail with picture on my Gmail account store the picture in my Dropbox and share it on Twitter, or etc.

Just a few days ago IFTTT launched a channel for makers.This was a highly awaited feature since until now it was impossible to connect prototypes to the recipes and only a few approved devices were available from large producers that were accepted in the platform. The Maker channel changes all that. It allows both making web requests to the channel to send events to other platforms from devices and from other platforms to the devices.

Constantin Craciun almost immediately add “DO” button with ESP8266-EVB and here is his tutorial.

You can see on this video how he uses ESP8266 to switch ON and OFF lamp via his phone:

Now you can think of endless apps for this DO button, like sending SMS “I’m home” to parents phones when the kid arrive from school and press the button.

Or button at the reception desk of hotel which send message to taxi company “go to hotel xxx to pickup customer”, etc. etc.

We are working on the small cloud broker for our ESP8266 IoT Firmware, and this IFTTT API will be definitely among the first implemented!