ESP8266 Community Forum

- Mon May 16, 2016 9:45 pm #47532 I am doing a 5 day 6hr/day educational session with some highschool students. We will be covering a series of Arduino circuits and programs designed to teach programming and computational flow. After completing this, the students will individually assemble and program an 8x4 IOT Neopixel grid. Then another IOT 300 LED Neopixel strip as a class.

My original plan was to use ESP8266BASIC because it's so easy to create a web GUI, but I'm a little worried that switching the students to BASIC syntax right after teaching them Arduino might be too confusing.

I'm now considering designing the grid as an Arduino shield instead of a standalone unit. This would allow me to take advantage of the Arduino's 5v and 3.3v regulators, DC power input, and USB power input. The students would program their light procedures in Arduino on the Uno, and ESP8266BASIC would act as the GUI, communicating with the Uno through UART.

Does anyone have any opinions or insights into either of these approaches?

- Tue May 17, 2016 11:54 am #47566

My original plan was to use ESP8266BASIC because it's so easy to create a web GUI, but I'm a little worried that switching the students to BASIC syntax right after teaching them Arduino might be too confusing.

Why don't you stick with the Arduino IDE then?
You can program the ESP itself using the Arduino IDE, so imho the best thing would be to ditch the Arduino boards at that point and transition to use Wemos D1/NodeMCU devkit boards as standalone micro controller, while the students keep programming using the Arduino IDE.

As for your shield idea: the 3.3V line on Arduino boards is insufficient to power an ESP. When moving from Arduino hardware to ESPs, I would rather recommend to use this as a teachable moment to explain the difference between 3.3V & 5V hardware and explain some techniques for level shifting.