NODEMCU BOARD

NodeMCU is a development board consists of an ESP8266 wifi module. It is a low-cost wifi board with LUA based firmware. It is an open-source platform, where the hardware design is open for edit and build.

The board has GPIO pins and serial communication pins. This is the basic board to start work on IoT projects. The pin configuration of the board is shown below.

Now the pin description for all the pins on the board are shown below and discussed.

GPIO(General Purpose Input Output) Pins:

  This board has GPIO pins as show in the above image. We can make it digital high/low to control the components like LED. We can even generate the pwm signal    with these GPIO pins.

  ADC(Analog to Digital Converter) Pins:

  It has one ADC pin on the board. This pin can be used to transform the signal into digital form. This board has one 10-bit ADC pin to convert the data obtained    from external sensors to digital format.

  SPI(Serial Peripheral Interface) Pins:

  NodeMCU hadware has four pins for SPI communication protocols. The board also support Quad-SPI communication. This board can support any SPI enabled device      to have SPI interface for communication.

  I2C(Inter-Integrated Circuit) Pins:

  This I2C is a serial bus interface protocol. It is also known as TWI(Two Wire Interface), since it uses two wires for I2C communication. Moreover all the GPIO pins on        the board cannot support I2C communication.

  UART(Universal Asynchronous Receiver Transmitter) Pins:

  NodeMCU board has two UART interfaces, known as UART0, UART1. This interface can be used to upload the firmware codes to the board. This interface cannot be used for other applications while used for firmware codes uploading.

  Now looking forward on the software programming of the nodeMCU board, Arduino IDE is used as the platform to compile and upload the code.

  Now let us set up the Arduino IDE for nodeMCU

  Download the IDE software from  https://www.arduino.cc/en/Main/Software

  Open Arduino IDE and Go to File->Preferences

Now Open Preferences menu and enter the Arduino boards manager url link
Now select the nodeMCU 1.0 board from tools->boards

Now your Arduino IDE is ready to communicate with nodeMCU

  Finally connect the NodeMCU module with the usb cable to upload the code

 

Now upload the sample code into your NodeMCU to check its working.

  After uploading the output can be seen on the SERIAL MONITOR

void setup()

{
Serial.begin(9600);  /* initialise serial communication */
}

void loop()

{
Serial.println("Robotic Electronics"); /* print Robotic Electronics at new line per second */
  delay(1000);
}

This completes the basic setup of the NodeMCU board with Arduino IDE. This is the most basic board to start of working with the exciting IoT projects.

Also read about – Arduino UNO

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