ESP8266 Community Forum

- Wed Dec 01, 2021 11:10 pm #92967 I currently communicate with a SBC over serial using minicom. I'd like to go wireless now and there are complications that make a USB dongle a poor choice.
Is it possible to use an ESP8266 such as ESP01 either as a very slow dongle to do SSH with putty or as a serial bridge to do something like minicom?

- Sat Dec 11, 2021 6:48 am #93032 Theoretically it's possible to use an ESP8266 as an USB adapter. But looks like nobody has done that successfully in real life...

- Mon Jan 10, 2022 1:50 pm #93313 Okay, so this is going to get a little weird.
I have a little AI I wrote on a SBC. She does speech recognition, and synthesis but I need to access the little computer to modify code and do maintenance.
Currently I use a serial cable and TTY, but I'd rather do this wireless. My first thought was simply to install a usb dongle and use ssh, but that has a drawback as the SBC has only one unused usb port and I like to plug a thumb drive into it for file trandfer.
What I'm looking for now is a way to use an ESP to establish a connection between a big computer and a little computer with a console.
Does this sound like any projects that have been done successfully? I have uart, spi, and i2c on the little computer.
As a final effort I suppose I could hack up a usb hub and install it in her case but I'd like a cleaner solution.

- Tue Mar 08, 2022 9:06 am #93848 Hi,

that's exactly the same what I want to do:

I currently communicate with a SBC over serial using minicom. I'd like to go wireless now and there are complications that make a USB dongle a poor choice.
Is it possible to use an ESP8266 such as ESP01 either as a very slow dongle to do SSH with putty or as a serial bridge to do something like minicom?

I also have an SBC (good old Z80 that is) with a standard serial connector. I used to use a special cable with a 9 pin serial connector on the one side and a USB connector on the other side. But now I want to make this connection wireless, i.e. via wifi. So I planned to grab an ESP8266-01, connecting RxD and TxD of the ESP to the SBC and to put an SSH server into the ESP. So I can use a standard SSH client from whereever inside my network to connect to the SBC.

It shouldn't be too complicated to get an SSH server up and running, except for the encryption. I don't know if the ESP has enough power to do this or if there are already tested SSL libraries at hand, that has to be figured out. But this seems to become an interesting project.

Hennes