Description

ESP8266 is a low cost Wifi module that retails around $6. This wiki page documents the steps to get the ESP8266 working with an Mbed LPC1768. There are several versions of the ESP8266 board available from different vendors. The one we used is the MOD-WIFI-ESP8266-DEV from Olimex. For other versions of the board, please look at the datasheet for the correct pin numbers to interface with an Mbed.

You can interface with the ESP8266 in multiple ways. The board offers a serial interface, a SPI interface and an i2c interface. We used serial because the serial interface is very easy to use.

Components Used

• 1 X MOD-WIFI-ESP8266-DEV Board
• 1 X Mbed

Wiring

The following wiring setup worked really well for us. But there might be some unnecessary wires connected to Vcc or Gnd. We didn't have enough time to test whether the module works without these wires. If you can get the module working with less number of wires than the ones listed below, please leave a comment in the comment section.

Library

I have created a draft library for the ESP8266 chip to interface with the Mbed.

Note: The library is just a draft. It doesn't have error checking or error handling. If you run into some problem, please email me @ arajasekaran at gatech.edu

I also wrote a small test program to test whether the chip connects to a Wifi network.