Ray and Ian
thanks for your replay!
@Ian
How can I contact you at…..nam!za?
I appreciate very much your offer of one of your boards: as you can see from the pictures I am very basic in electronic prototyping:
– first picture is a proto complete and running that use 74HC595 an RTC DS3231 , a 20*4 LCD I2C and an analog pin for buttons
(better to foreseen this option in you breadboard)
– second one is (not yet complete..) with PCF8574 …(having most pins free) I will go with digital buttons ( to enable double pressing)
On both board there is no SD card …I use instead SPIFFS that emulate an SD on the ESP flash.
This is the best I can do, as far as proto boards, hand soldering and use of stripboards. I also use existing boards as far as possible:
for ESP8266 this an NODEMCU v1.0, for RTC this is ZS 042 with a 32k EEPROM pin .
The way I have ported the software should maintain full backward compatibility therefore I can select different kind of hardware just using few #define
I testing now…debugging on first propotype…… I will start soon with the second!
I don’t use SD card since I want to have more GPIO available and I cannot afford to use 4 for SPI : I want to leave the pins for future development for local data acquisition (temperature, humidity and rain amount ) since local Wunder stations are not very reliable and I will use one of the stations in a glass house.
As far as use of pin on ESP8266 (in my case NODEMCU 1.0) I made a table on attachment 3 : as you can see 3 pins are use for flashing and booting the unit (better you dont use it). Unfortunately ESP are not so well documented and the n. of pin available is very short(better to use ESP8266 v1.2+ or NODEMMCU 1.0+).
Other point: I have preferred to use of an external I2c EEPROM rather than using ESP flash memory (could be erased) since I don’t believe there is any speed issue.
One question: how can I modify the weather algoritm ( it is done outside the code )?
I have seen a lot in the forum but it is only related to the Raspberry PI and is done with plug-in!
