ESP8266 connected to WIFI network

During XMas hollidays I followed the exiting discussion about the new ESP8266 module. When I came home I was thrilled to find that it had arrived from China via mail.

I had to use a special 3.3 ttl cable. Unlike the Arduino everything is 3.3 volts on the ESP8266.

I have seen multiple posts about USB not providing enought power for the module. To be on the save side I used a 12V wall wart and a YwRobot converter.

The only real hurdle that I experienced was wifi connectivity. The accesspoint I use for my "Things" network is configured by default to use WAP2 with CCMP encryption. I was not able to connect to this wifi network using the ESP8266 and default firmware (Vendor:www.ai-thinker.com Version:0.9.2.4). Once I configured the accesspoint to use the old WAP standard with TKIP encryption it worked!

For debugging I used this very useful script: https://github.com/guyz/pyesp8266/blob/master/esp8266test.py

The script checks basic serial communication, then lists the available wifi networks, and connects to the given network and prints out the obtained IP address. The script produces the following dialog:

$ python esp8266test.py /dev/ttyUSB0 Things password
INFO:root:Sending command: AT
DEBUG:root:
DEBUG:root:OK
INFO:root:Command result: OK
INFO:root:Sending command: AT+CWMODE=1
DEBUG:root:no change
INFO:root:Command result: no change
INFO:root:Sending command: AT+CWLAP
DEBUG:root:+CWLAP:(3,"HANAMI",-45,"84:1b:5e:dd:xx:yy",6)
DEBUG:root:+CWLAP:(2,"Things",-64,"34:31:c4:88:xx:yy",11)
DEBUG:root:
DEBUG:root:OK
INFO:root:Command result: OK
INFO:root:Sending command: AT+CWJAP="Things","password"
INFO:root:Command result: AT+CWJAP="Things","password"

INFO:root:Sending command: AT+CIFSR
DEBUG:root:192.168.11.22
DEBUG:root:
DEBUG:root:OK
INFO:root:Command result: OK

The ESP8266 is able to connect directly to sensors (no additional Microcontroller necessary). I can not wait to build a wifi enable temperature sensor. I have already installed the toolchain to compile my own firmware.

Best, Mark