IoT Deployment Board (English)

The IoT Deployment Board 3.0

Introduction

The new board: IoT Deployment Board 3.0, is ready to setup the most projects in: IoT, domotics, robotics, control, lighting, Wi-Fi, web server, MQTT, virtual instrumentation (dashboard), and a very vast variety of projects. The limit is the imagination.

The IoT Deployment Board 3.0 is based on the ESP8266-01 module, flashed with MicroPython programming language. MicroPython is a compact (600 kB) package, a very efficient implementation of the well-known Python 3. The installed version is a fresh release of 2019.

With MicroPython is very easy to program the board, and easy to find code examples in almost everywhere, since Python programmers’ community is quite broad.

The IoT Deployment Board 3.0 has a 1 MB flash memory from factory, with about ~400 kB free space for data and programs. Remember, Python is a very compact language, so most of the programs are from few kB of size (1-10 kB). Nevertheless, if a 4 MB flash memory version of the ESP8266-01 is desired it can be provided upon request.

The IoT Deployment Board 3.0 is an extension board of the ESP8266-01 that has been provided with facilities to take advantages from inputs, outputs, and communication ports, in such way that is much easier to work with different types of sensors and devices that can be attached to their ports.

Next is a summary with the specifications of the IoT Deployment Board 3.0.

Electrical Specifications

	General Electrical Specifications
Item		Min	Max
External Power supply (5 V recommended)		4.5 V	12 V
External Battery ( 4.8 - 6 V recommended)		4.5 V	9 V
Power consumption		33 mW	1.3 W @ 5V max: load
Internal regulator (800 mA max)		3.3 V	3.36 V
Output connector supply		0 A	1.25 A@ 5V
Operation frequency		80 MHz	160 MHz
Output collector current		0	40 mA, each output
Item		Supported
Aux V_CC output Through output connector and aux connector		YES	3 pins
Output connector		YES	7 pins
Aux connector		YES	4 pins
Power led		YES	1 blue or red
GPIO		YES	GPIO-00 and 02
Led indicator x 2 GPIO-00 and 02		YES	GPIO00-RED GPIO02-RED
I2C and OneWire protocol		YES	GPIO00 and 02
PWM		YES	GPIO00 and 02
Wi-Fi hardware		YES	2.4 GHz b/g/n
Flash selector		YES	Pin header, jumper
Reset Bottom		YES	SMD push button
USB-to serial UART connector		YES	Pin header
MicroPython installed		Yes	Ver1.1 2019

Table 1. IoT Deployment Board: electrical specifications

Easy connectors for input/output pins, led indicators, driven outputs as open collector for higher loads, internal power regulator, and a wide range of power supply are some of the features that let the designer to be very comfortable in the designing, wiring the hardware, and programming in any project.

Next is the specifications of the Board connectors:

Connectors

Connectors Specifications
External power supply	DC female jack, 5.5 x 2.1 mm Socket C26
External Battery	pin header 1x2 male 2.54 mm (1 row, 2 pins)
ESP8266 socket	2 x 8 vertical female 2.54 mm
Output connector	Pin header 1x7 vertical female 2.54 mm
Aux connector	Pin header 1x4 vertical male 2.54 mm
Flashing selector (jumper 2.54 mm)	Pin header 1x2 vertical male 2.54 mm (CN3)
Reset push button	SMD, SPST IP40, 3 mm (SW2)
USB-serial UART connector 1x3	Pin header 1x3 vertical male 2.54 mm (CN2)

Table 2. IoT Deployment Board: connectors specifications

Physical Description

1-Power led

2-Main Output connector (see figure 3)

3-IN/OUT GPIO LEDs

4-SW2/Reset button

5-CN3 Flash jumper (see figure 3)

6-CN2/UART. Serial USB cable. (see figure 3)

7-Aux connector

8-Battery In (see figure 3)

9- Power Supply connector

Connectors Description

The USB-serial cable could be any generic one. It should looks like this:

Board should look at this picture:

Now an appropriate driver software must be installed in the computer.

Most cases with Prolific driver, Windows system install a driver that does not work, and this is done by default. User needs to install a new one and change the driver version. Recommended Prolific driver version that proves to work is the 3.3.2.105 dated from 27/10/2008.

Prolific driver 3.3.2.105 version can be found on Internet, anyway, is also available from here:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/18D3056NrgoMCBj4UA4GLvF-_KQzap9iQ/view?usp=sharing

Of course you can find a newer version of Prolific driver on Prolific's web site.

For Windows OS in:

https://www.prolific.com.tw/US/ShowProduct.aspx?p_id=225&pcid=41

And for MAC OS version:

https://www.prolific.com.tw/US/ShowProduct.aspx?p_id=229&pcid=41

Newer versions diffrent of the Prolific driver 3.3.2.105 have not been tested yet.

Once the correct driver version 3.3.2.105 (in our case) is installed, proceed to change the driver version, following the procedure as depicted in scheme below:

Follow the scheme, then select the version 3.3.2.105 dated from 27/10/2008.

At the highlighted point you should see the following screen:

Then select the .3.2.105 dated from 27/10/2008.

The above mentioned procedure is only neccesary in the cases where the Operating System dooes not recognize the device, because driver compatibility.

Then proceed to check if everything is correct:

In Windows, open the control panel, and then select Device Manager. Expand the Ports (COM and LPT) tree. You should see Prolific driver USB-serial indicated.

Check the COM where is installed, see figure below.

If the COM where driver is installed has some conflict with other COM it can be changed by selecting Port Configuration tab, then in advance options there is a drop-down list, there are 256 COM ports, select any COM that is currently not used.

Select properties from right click menu, and click on controller tab, then check that the information shown is consistent with driver version 3.3.2.105 already referred here.

Figure below is showing the controller information, indicating that the current driver is the desired one.

To Flash Your Board

Your IoT Deployment Board is already flashed with a fresh released of MicroPython. But in any case, if user decide to burn or flash a new firmware user can do it. To do, just power off the board and short with jumper CN3 connector. Then, power up your board. Use a program to flash like Nodemcu Flasher, Arduino or your favorite program. You can download Nodemcu Flasher from:

For Win64:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1XXGj3ewuM-DVDlyPc1dW5it84I5iCGfJ/view?usp=sharing

For Win 32:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1VYatiKpyv4j2cEM1YOI-XpJ2WrQbq6nx/view?usp=sharing

Nodemcu flasher program has a very intuitive interface.

Then you have to download a firmware version for your board. Valid file must have *.bin extension. Release version of MicroPython can be download from:

https://micropython.org/download

In Firmware for ESP8266 boards section. Try to select the latest stable firmware.

At the time of writing this book the earlier version is the:

Esp8266-20191220-V1.12.bin

Once you have selected the flasher program and the firmware you can proceed to burn as follow:

· Click in the Config tab and select the path where the firmware is located in your PC.

· Click in the Advance and check: Flash size = 1 Mbyte, Flash speed = 26.37MHz, Baud rate = 115200, and SPI Mode = DOUT.

· Click in Flash button.

If everything goes well, flashing will start. A Green bar is advancing up to complete the process, you will be prompt when process is finished. Then power off the board, remove the CN3 jumper. Then power up the board again. Now the board is flashed, but to test the program follow the section about to prepare the software.

You can also Deploy the firmware by using esptool.py program as described in the tutorial available on:

http://docs.micropython.org/en/latest/esp8266/tutorial/intro.html#deploying-the-firmware

Reset Button

Retest button is also shown in connectors description. Any time you need to reset board (hard reset) you can press and release this bottom. There also a way to reset (soft reset) by pressing CTL+C, it will break the execution of any program.

Battery Operation

Board can operate from battery power. Minimum recommended voltage is 4.8 V. Battery can be from lithium, Ni-MH, Ni-Cd, or alkaline type. Capacity will depend on the load; a 2000 mAh is a good capacity for battery. Please be careful to connect the battery with the correct polarity, because there is not internal reverse protection, so be sure to connect positive and negative to their respective battery electrodes.

If a voltage decreases below 4.3 V, the execution program can be stopped or frozen.

Battery will be in a charging state if it is connected while using power supply from external source or charger. Once the external source is disconnected battery will be immediately supplying .

Connect the battery through Battery connector as shown in the connectors description. You will see +5V and GND indicators on the board.

Communicating and programming the board

Once you have the hardware ready you will need to prepare the software. For this, you can use whatever serial communicator or terminal emulator software like PuTTY (Windows, Mac, Linux), Tera Term (Windows), Arduino IDE series monitor (Windows, Mac, Linux), Sublime, esptool.py program, or your preferred one. All mentioned here are free to use. Download your preferred.

In this book we recommend and use uPyCraft IDE (Windows, Mac, Linux). uPyCraft IDE is a very simple, intuitive and practical application that provides a good starting point for developers.

Download UpyCraft Here

(File is encrypted the password is: IoTDev)

Enough information about how to use and an user manual of uPyCraft IDE is also available to download in link below:

The Upycraft documentation

You can find a big support for MicroPython at:

https://micropython.org/

Please download and install: uPyCraft IDE or your preferred Python editor on your PC.

In our case, we will use uPyCraft IDE as default MicroPython editor

Open uPyCraft IDE and setup the connection parameters like indicated in the figure below.

Go to Tools menu. Then, in serial option check that COM shown is the same where your USB-serial driver was previously installed. In our case is COM5.

Then go to Preferences in same Tools menu. Check about baud speed. Most of time it is 115.200 bauds by default. See figure 13. But, if some reason you see some illegible characters when communicating please try with lower speed, like 9600 or other different baud until you see all legible characters. Let the rest of parameters as default.

Again, in same Tools menu, check is the ESP8266 board is selected.

Now you can power up the IoT Deployment Board with USB-serial Cable plugged.

With selected options in uPyCraft IDE proceed as follow: press connection link icon as indicated in the figure 15. If all goes well, a Python prompt (>>>) is shown in the REPL console section of the uPyCraft.

Note: if you press again the icon link it will disconnect the board, then the prompt will not be shown anymore. In this case, press again the icon link.

REPL means Read-Eval-Print-Loop, is a high interactive language console, basically, takes user input, and evaluates and returns the result. This method is particularly adopted in scripts-based programming languages, like Python.

If you see the command prompt, you can be sure the board is already connected.

Now push the reset button on the board, and you will see a new message showing the installed MicroPython version and some others information after the board has successfully completed the boot up operation.

You can interact to the Board by means of Console or by program. In console you can write and execute immediately the code. But if you need to make a program or function to be downloaded into the board you will need to write some lines of code. Then use the program area.

To run the program, you need to put a name and to save it in your PC before to download and run in the board. Then click in download & run icon (see the above), program will be automatically downloaded and run in the board.

In the uPyCraft you have a device, uPy_lib, and workspace folders. In the device folder there are all programs current downloaded into the board. Two of them are very important boot.py and main.py. The first one, boot.py, has a boot up sequence of the board, and it is created by default. The second one, main.py, can be created after and can be invoked or not by boot.py. It is used here to load all programs you desire after the boot up sequence (boot.py) is loaded.

You will see an example of using main.py in following sections.

Now, everything is okay….!

Download an Run Programs

You can program in the uPyCraft environment and then download and run to your board.

Programs that are downloaded to the board remains in the device folder. So if you want to execute a particular one just double click in the device folder, then it will appear in the program area, then press icon to Download and Run, it will be executed.

Also, you can program in a different environment and then select the file from file menu in uPyCraft and press Download and Run button, it will be executed.

You have so many ways to program and run as it is completely flexible.

Additionally, you can download a zip or rar file containing many functionally examples that works in the board.

Download here.

The compressed package contains a list of the program that can be downloaded and try for any purpose as free to try “as it is”.

So far, the list contains the following programs. However, the list may change at any time, as new programs will be added continuously.