How I got here

Posted on Tue 26 July 2016 in esp8266

I made a new years resolution to get into electronics.
Then I discovered aliexpress and it became a super cheap new hobby. Then the raspberry pi zero arrived and I wasn't so worried about busting it while I learned.

The GPIO python library was pretty easy to learn. A few months later and I was seeing a lot of chatter about a new microcontroller called the esp8266 - with wifi, wooo! It worked with the arduino ide and most of the C examples worked.

esp8266

Like magic both the esp8266 and python were to be combined in a kickstarter. It ended with 475% funded!!

I like micropython a lot. It's a relatively new minimal python 3 platform targeting microcontrollers. Alternatively you can have a big machine and fire up a thousand instances. I've been playing around with it on the ESP8266 and more recently on the BBC Microbit.

I'm also liking the Wemos D1 mini version of the esp8266. It has all the things it needs on the board and all you have to do is plug in the usb cable. Its breadboard compatible and also comes with a range of hats.

d1_mini

So I built lots of useless thinks, stuck the iot label on them and am now going to blog about them.

My goals here are

  • Show some awesome things
  • Spread the knowledge
  • Improve my technical writing

If I can achieve one of these I'll be happy