Simple ESP8266 07 to 01 Flashing Adaptor

hey guys so today I want to show you guys how to build this nice neat little esp8266 oh seven or 12 - oh one adapter so I decided to make this because I have yet to find a convenient adapter that lets me just pop on and off ESP oh seven or twelve modules for quick programming I found a lot of things that have the ESP - seven or 12s integrated onto a premade board or boards that expand the pins on this to a more convenient form factor but I have not found anything that just lets me pop the module on flash it take it off and use it so I made this little this little adapter here which goes from the oh seven or 12 - millimeter spaced header pins to the same form factor the 2.5 4 millimeter spaced header pins on the o1 module and so this allows for very easy if you have little flashing board I've made this one giuls it makes it as easy as just plugging it right in and then you can go ahead and flash your boards so I made this for myself and I want to share with you guys how I did it because I personally think that the oh seven and twelve modules are at least a lot more useful than the oh one modules they have a lot more IO broken out on them they're honestly they're smaller and they don't have these built-in pins just sticking out the bottom of them so I've really fallen in love with the O seven modules recently and I actually have an order of twenty twelve modules so when those come in this little adapter is going to get a lot more use so let's get into how I built this the parts that you're going to need are two lengths of the two millimeter spaced header pins so these are the header pins they can actually stick into the oh seven or twelve modules and these can be a little bit hard to find I ordered mine from digi-key but you can also find these headers listed as the xB or ZigBee radio headers it's the same pin spacing and it's just a little bit smaller than the standard 2.5 4 millimeter pins so if you can give if you can find some of these that's what you need and then you also need either to separate one by four lengths of these standard 2.5 4 millimeter headers or if you can find a 2 by 4 if you have some of that laying around that's also fine I only happen to have one by fours so I'm just going to end up hot gluing these together to make it 2 by 4 but ultimately you'll end up connecting these into a 2 by 4 anyways you're also going to need 8 in total wires so I have these multicolored wires that actually came from a little multicolored ribbon cable here I just separated them out because it's going to make it a lot easier to solder these together if they're separated so you're going to need 8 of those in total and I prefer to have multicolored wires when working with this but if you only have one color that's no problem it just might get a little bit more confusing and that's all the parts you actually need now you will need a soldering iron and solder and you will also I highly recommend having a hot glue gun of some sort or some way to glue all of this together into a neat little package so those are the tools that you'll need you will also need some sort of wire strippers to strip these wires and make it so you can solder them and I believe that's it for all the tools and parts that you're going to need for this project so let's get started building it so the first thing that I like to do is I like to just pop the headers into the board that way I at least have a good reference for which pins I'm soldering and connecting to each other pop it on my little bit of duct tape to keep it steady and the first connection that I always make is the oh seven and 12 modules have the GPIO 15 pin broken out so that is the second pin from the right side here and it's right next to ground and in order to boot these modules correctly that pin actually needs to be connected to ground now on most of my modules I have actually soldered a little bridge connecting those two pins but I figure might as well be safe than sorry so I actually fold this pin over and connect it and basically bridge it to ground and then I make that connection final by soldering them together so now the GPIO pin 15 and ground have been connected together then that's the step I always start with because that's one that I'm likely to forget if I don't while we're already on the topic of ground I figure next step let's take our black wire this is going to be my ground wire and solder that to our little ground pin here there we go now we have our first wire our ground wire soldered and connected now the next wire I want to do is the power wire so I'm going to tin this wire and in this connector and now we have our power and ground so at the very least at the moment we should be able to connect these two wires to night ground in 3.3 volts and our power our module should power up next why I want to do is the TX wire so this is a yellow wire that I'm using I tend to always end up using yellow 40 X from the device and orange 4rx from the device so get this soldered and the TX pin like that and now we get the RX pin connected the blue wire I use as my reset wire so some of this to the reset pin a brown wire I'm connecting to the enable pin or the CHP deep in the gray wire here I'm going to connect to GPIO 0 and the last wire is this purple wire here and this one is going to go to GPIO 2 so now we have this nice little spiderweb of wires here there should be 3 wires on the side with power with VCC there should be VCC CH en or the chip power down pin and the reset pin and on the left-hand side we have ground GPIO 0 GPIO 2 Rx and TX and with these wires connected we can now go ahead and bring them all together and kind of fold them onto the inside of our little setup here and this prepares us for the next step which is to mount this all to our board here so once you have all your wires in place like this running kind of down the center you're going to want to heat up your hot glue gun because next step is we're going to be applying glue to this little board here and sticking it onto our setup here first I recommend just putting a little bit you know a couple little beads of of hot glue on your mounting board before you go full force and put a whole lot on and this will allow us to just sort of place our base on to our board without making a big mess and without accidentally gluing the O seven or twelve board that we're using to hold the pins in place right now acts without accidently gluing it to our base so I'm just going to put just enough on here to get things started I'm not going to put too much I know it seems like there may even be a lot there but we're going to add more later on when we actually want to solidify this in place so for right now that much glue will do and I just place it on top of the pins like that give it a moment to cool off a little bit we can flip it over and it's still kind of molten I can still move this around a little bit straighten it up make it a little bit nicer but the main thing is that my oh seven module is not a fixed to the pins and that's an important thing to keep in mind is that you don't actually want to ask hot glue your board to your to your board here you just want to glue the use pins in place things have cooled down a little bit more and things are a little bit more firm I'm going to take my hot glue gun and I'm just going to add hot glue around the edges of these pins here being careful again not to accidentally hot glue the module in place we're still using it to just keep the pins held in their correct positions until we can get everything nicely cemented in with the hot glue to cool it off just a little bit more so that all of the pins are nicely solidly in place I would recommend just going and laying down a nice big blob of solder in the center here and this will just solidify all of our wires in place and keep them from moving around alright so now that we have our base firmly attached and we have all of our soldered points on our our headers to connect to the O 7 or 12 modules I like to go ahead and just clip the leads that I do not need off that way if on my module I have other devices connected to the pins that I am using the non programming pins I don't have to deal with worrying about whether having this hole clear or not is important I just have those pins clipped away so the pins that you can clip away are on this side on the side of ground we can clip away the third and fourth from the right hand side here so and clip this pin here and this pin here and then on the other side we can clip the second from the right and then we skip one and we can clip all the way up to the VCCS skip and then we clip clip clip and finally it last one clicked and that removes all of the unnecessary pins so that when we put our module on we are only placing it onto the pins that it actually needs for uploading new programs now I'd also like to point out at this point before we go further that I understand that these pins do not provide the best connection ever so if you have it and it just slides on just to cleanly and perfectly there's a good chance that one of the pins that are necessary for uploading programs especially the TX and rx pins aren't making a solid solid connection on your board so the way that I get around that is I have actually added little solder blobs to the to one side to one end of the board so on this far end here I have little solder blobs that are just at the base of those pins there and what that does is it forces the ESP module to fit on at a slight angle there so it doesn't make perfectly and that basically makes it so that the pins are torqued just a little bit and more or less forces a good enough connection to upload programs is it the best solution obviously not but this is also not the best solution for uploading programs onto your modules but it does work and I've made more than a couple of these at this point and that method seems to work pretty well just kind of adding a little bit of extra solder so that when you place the module on it doesn't sit perfectly flat but as a little bit torqued out out of its axis so so once you have all that completed the last step that we have to do is to take all of these why Cheers and saw dur them to our normal 2.5 four millimeter spaced male headers so so to make this easier I am going to put my headers on to this little breadboard here just to keep them held upright and in place while I'm soldering to them now I've gone ahead and I've clipped all of these leads so that they are more or less the exact same length I recommend you do the same that way when you get to the point that they're all soldered you'll have any oddly long ones that are just sort of stragglers out there they're all kind of neatly the same length and I'm going to start again with positive I'm going to start with the red one here and on the video there's a diagram showing which pins need to connect to which points on the oh one it's basically just an a1 pin out and we're just going to connect all of these wires that we've connected on the oh seven adapter here and we're going to connect them to their corresponding points on the header pins the o1 header pins as you can see I have finished now getting all of the pins here soldered for both sides of the header and at this point you should be functionally done so you should be able to take both of these sets of headers and plug them into your programmer and pop your ESP module on and upload code now there are a couple extra little things that I like to do with these to make them a little bit easier first is just if you don't have a two by four header you just have these one by four headers like me I recommend hot gluing these two sections together to form a two by four so I do that most easily by just putting it into either breadboard or your socket here so that they're nice and neatly lined up and then all you have to do is just take a glue gun and just put a little bit of hot glue around the wires and on both sides and this will not only will this hold the two headers together but it'll also provide a small amount of strain relief on the wires so once you let that cool you can pop it out of the socket and you're good to go I recommend even doing this hot gluing even if you do have two by fours just for the strain relief on the wires it actually does help a lot and it prevents any stray little wires from desoldering or little bits of wire touching one of the other header pins because this is a free-form project so I recommend doing that regardless and now all that's left is to test to that so I've got my USB here I'm going to plug it into my computer off-camera and we have power on the FTDI module now when we upload our program flashes and the programmer starts doing its thing uploading the program and then that's it and we're done and now we've flashed our little ESP o7 module and again this also the same mod the same adapter works for the 12 model as well so hope you guys found that interesting I have not found any convenient little adapters to upload programs onto these modules so I went ahead and built this myself and I hope this helps some of you guys out I personally I think that the O's 7 and 12 modules are just way more powerful and way more useful than the O 1 modules so this has been a really big help so like this video if you found this interesting and useful and if you want to see more videos like this subscribe to my channel and you can also find me at it kind of works Inc on Twitter as well as it kind of works comm so thanks and I'll see you guys later

Channel: ItKindaWorks

Views: 11,652

Keywords: esp8266, tutorial, adaptor, esp 07, esp 12, esp 01, make, build, flash, flasher, arduino, ftdi, hot glue, solder, wire, header, 2mm, 2.54mm, 2.00mm, connector, wifi, microcontroller, breakout, reset, esp8266 01, esp8266 07, esp8266 12, programmer, programming

Id: sJc7L4kseos

Length: 20min 25sec (1225 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 12 2016