Breakout Board for ESP-12F

[jolny]

Hello!
I work for a Swedish electronics reseller and we've started selling ESP-12F, however we want to be able to provide a breakout board for it.
There are some ESP breakouts available online, however most of them lack the extra pinouts which the ESP-12F (and possibly some earlier version) has. Is anyone on this forum able/interested in helping us make a breakout board?
It can of course be made open-source and uploaded to OpenHardware

Specifications:

• Pitch from 2 mm to 2.54 mm (
• Buttons for RESET and Flash (GPIO0)
• 3.3V Regulator or capacitor?
• 10K resistor between CHPD-VCC and GPIO2-GND
• Maybe FTDI pinout?
• Other optional pins? Battery JST-plug?

If no one is interested, then at the very least maybe we can start a discussion as to what the optimal breakout board would be

[scalz]

@jolny : Hi. I can't tell I'm an expert, but I have designed sort of tft shields of esp-12F. I'm curious, for what do you need the extra pins? I thought these was not useful or was internal used...maybe I'm wrong?
Maybe you won't like it as it is minimal, but it's small, the wemos D1mini.

[jolny]

@scalz said:

wemos D1mini

Thanks for the tip! We'll look into it.
As for the extra pins, it appears as though there are two GPIOs (9/10) and SPI pins (SCLK, MISO, MOSI) so I guess it depends on the application whether they're useful
I also found this board which looks nice: http://www.electrodragon.com/product/esp8266-smd-adapter-board/#prettyPhoto
What I miss is perhaps FTDI. I like the fact that the Wemos has a USB port though, maybe that is better than FTDI? It's definitively more accessible, what do you think?

BTW, while I'm at it, I saw this: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/214379695/micropython-on-the-esp8266-beautifully-easy-iot
This module is amazing.

[scalz]

@jolny: cool. maybe you are right, I don't remember exactly when I looked at which gpio or not...I remember there was some which were internally used for flash or other things..but maybe it can be used in some case, so... I will look at your work true is that esp8266 lacks of gpio. I can't wait to see the upcoming esp32. Sometimes I check at their forum, it seems they are making a great job and have alreade made some steps in arduino world too!

I didn't know this micropython projects...it seems very cool but this just a firmware project, they are using adafruit huzzah board, isn't it?

[jolny]

I didn't know about ESP32, thanks for the info! Will keep an eye on it. Since Beta testing started in December it may take a while before they're released

Yes, the Micro Python project will be a kind of firmware which will adapt the ESP8266 to work more like you'd expect from a network controller. They stated in the video that it currently uses a lot of callbacks which can be confusing. It will work for all ESP8266, however the HUZZAH boards will be officially supported.

Espressif said USB is expensive and they don't believe it's the future, which I can kind of agree with since it is possible to uplad data to the ESP8266 over the air.

[scalz]

yep. but sometimes, usb powered things are useful, in case of esp8266 which is not a lowpower thing