ESP Breakout board with Custom Programmer

Story :

We all love working with this little ESP8266 modules. They comes in a lot of different breakout boards. For example NodeMCU, Wemos D1 Mini are just a name of few. Those are great for Prototyping and tinkering But if we want to make any project permanent then use this boards are pretty overkilled in my opinion. I mean after finalizing a project you'll barely need it to reprogram it ever again. and sometimes the size is also matters as well,right!

So keeping that in mind I thought it'd be great if I separate the programming circuitry from my design. In this way the PCB would be smaller and I can still program it in future if I want to.

What's the Difference ?

So, you might be wondering that similar products are already available on the market, then Why I made this one? And yes you are right. You will easily find A ESP8266 Breakout PCB and a USB to TTL converter in the market. But the main problem With this modules are that they are not the thing which you actually want in your project and you'll see how is that letter on.

Features :

As I mentioned earlier this is a two part project. one is the breakout board and other is the programmer. So let's talk about the breakout board first.

ESP8266 Breakout Board :

Apart from breaking out all the necessary pins this board also has a on board 5v to 3.3v voltage regulator. Since most of the sensors are 5v so Its safe to use in any of your 5v project. secondly it has a separate row of pins dedicated for the programming purposes. So you don't need to plug out your board from any project whenever you need to program it.

Programmer :

The ESP8266 need it's GPIO 0 pin low while booting up in order to get into the programming mode. On the NodeMCU its usually done by two darlington transistors but USB programmer you will find in the market don't have that freature so you need to manually put it into programming mode. which means pulling down the GPIO0 while reseting the board. And believe me that's really a nasty task, you have to do every time you wanna program your board. But with my programmer you don't need to do any of that. It has the auto programming circuitry built in. so you just have to put the programmer on top of the breakout board and its ready for programming. its based on CH340 USB to serial converter Ic and has a micro USB on it.