ESP8266 Community Forum

Foogod wrote:I'm kinda surprised nobody has pointed this out thus far, but those extra pins on the 12E are not just for SDIO. They're apparently all GPIO pins as well (by the look of things, GPIO6 - GPIO11). This means that while the ESP-12 only has 11 GPIOs, the ESP-12E actually brings out the full 17 GPIOs supported by the ESP8266EX chip! For some applications, this seems extremely worthwhile to me.

Well, don't get too excited about extra GPIO pins. Like all other, these too serve dual or triple purpose and are unusable, since onboard flash chip uses them. I read somewhere, that there is a way to free up two pins though - by running flash chip in DIO mode.

I am in contact with AI Thinker at the moment. Ill ask them about this when I get a moment.
Discussing technical questions via one of their sales ladies, who has borderline English at best - taking longer than it should. Will ask once I get my questions sorted - one thing at a time, don't want to cloud the issue further!

I have 30 of those rounded corner ESP-12E's which I brought of Aliexpress. Will be getting some more from AI Thinker directly soon, as well as some ESP-06's, so will find out what is what, but I agree that they are likely to be an initial production run or something, and issues have since been corrected.

I bought 5 of these, waiting for the breakout boards to try them out. I opened it up and I couldn't find anything about the flash ic they are using. Most probably it's a 512kbyte flash, even though the seller mentioned large-4M flash in the title...

On the flash ic, I see the following"md25032sig". Anyone can confirm the flash size?

The label "md25032sig" would probably means that it is a 32Mbits (4MBytes), since Winbond label is similar with "W25Q32".