just two weeks back our preferred provider of inexpensive ESP8266 boards, WeMos, released the long-awaited LOLIN32 ESP-32 board, as well as it’s practically a killer. Hackaday routine [deshipu] tipped us off, as well as we put an purchase within minutes; if WeMos is making a dirt-cheap ESP32 advancement board, we’re on board! It came in the mail yesterday. (They’re out of stock now, much more expected soon.)
If you’ve been complying with the chip’s development, you’ll understand that the very first spin of ESP-32s had some silicon bugs (PDF) that may matter to you if you’re working with deep sleep modes, changing between specific clock frequencies, or utilizing the brown-out-reset function. Do the classy new, $8, advancement boards include silicon version 0 or 1? checked out on to discover out!
The great News
The board style is essentially perfect. It takes much more than a bit motivation from Adafruit’s Feather series. Imitation is the sincerest type of flattery. It has 4 MiB flash memory onboard, a USB-serial adapter (cp210x), as well as a LiPo battery charger as well as connector. All the appropriate pins are damaged out as well as well-labeled, especially on the bottom. It has a good central reset button, as well as even a single individual LED for your blinking pleasure.
The default firmware seems to be stuck in a loop scanning our WiFi network, as well as it doesn’t seem to be running a soft AP like some ESP8266 firmwares do either. We couldn’t figure out exactly how to make it associate. That’s cool, we’ll be flashing our own firmware soon sufficient anyway.
For the price, it has one much more function (the LiPo) than we’d ask for. It even (barely) fiits into a basic breadboard. Can’t beat that with a stick. No question they stocked out in the very first week.
The poor News
You understand this implies that the WeMos LOLIN32 is populated with ESP32 rev 0 silicon, right? Well, yeah. To test it, you can download the whole SDK (here), set up the compile toolchain, compose a little program to test a specific bit in prolonged fuse memory, as well as flash it in.
But then we kept in mind that we found a “secret” fundamental interpreter inside the ESP32 and, with a bit syntax assist from [Sprite_tm], even got PEEK as well as poke working on the bit beasties. So we evaluated bits like it’s 1988!
Pulling pin 12 as much as 3.3 V as well as hitting reset brings up the Easter-Egg fundamental interpreter. link to the ESP32 at 115,200 baud as well as you’re in business.
# inspect a fuse register that ought to include data
a = peek(&H3FF5A008)
print(a)
15213578
# inspect the fuse register with the version info
a = peek(&H3FF5A00C)
print(a)
0
Sigh. There you have it, folks, the saddest 32 bits in black as well as white: old silicon in the WeMos LOLIN32. We’re not 100% sure exactly how much the bugs impact the typical utilize case, as well as we’ll be figuring that out in the next week or so. stay tuned.