Introduction

creDomESP1 all 600NodeMCU v3 is a very useful and powerful controller based on ESP8266 microcontroller with 2.4GHz WiFi, GPIO ports, analog input, I2C bus, UART and 1wire ports, equipped with a dual-in-line strip male connector.

It's a very cheap open-source platform, a bit expensive in terms of current consumption (normally 80mA @5V = 400mW), but very appreciated in home automations and Internet of Things.

Using the ESPEasy firmware, it's possible to combine this card with Domoticz/raspberry home automation controller.

Creasol has designed the DomESP1 board that permits to easily supply the NodeMCU board by a switching mode regulator, and connect inputs, outputs, I2C and 1wire sensors/devices (e.g. DS18B20 thermal and other humidity sensors) by terminal blocks. The board, as shown in the picture, has 4 relay outputs with 5A 250V switching capaibility, and all circuitry to manage I2C bus, 1wire bus, ....

A LED on every input and output permits to check the status of the board and found any problem on wire connections or firmware configuration: LEDs are enabled by pressing the button Test .

The LEDs enable feature and the switching mode power supply lead to a full control of inputs/outputs with an optimized power consumption.

It's possible to purchase:

  1. the plain DomESP1 board: the client should purchase and program by himself the ESP8266 module, 900 mil header pitch;
  2. the DomESP1 board, with the ESP8266 module already programmed with the latest ESPEasy firmware.

 

Installing firmware on NodeMCU board and first configuration

  1. On Linux, install esptool: for Debian/Ubuntu/similar, run the command
    apt update; apt install esptool
  2. Download ESPEasy version 2.0.0 from https://www.letscontrolit.com/wiki/index.php/ESPEasy#Loading_firmware or clicking on https://github.com/letscontrolit/ESPEasy/releases selecting the last version available, and uncompress the zip archive: inside the bin directory you can find several images, read the README.txt to find out which image is for you. For LoLin modules with 4M of ram, a good image is bin/ESP_Easy_mega-20190813_test_core_242_ESP8266_4M.bin
  3. Connect the NodeMCU board to the PC using a microUSB cable
  4. Run the command to load the firmware:
    on Linux you should install esptool and execute, from the shell,
    /usr/bin/esptool --baud 115200 --port /dev/ttyUSB0 write_flash 0 ESPEasy_R120_4096.bin
    on Windows or Mac, please read the instructions within the ESPEasy package
    You should see on the console the following result:

    esptool.py v2.5.0
    Serial port /dev/ttyUSB0
    Connecting....
    Detecting chip type... ESP8266
    Chip is ESP8266EX
    Features: WiFi
    MAC: b4:e6:2d:36:e7:d1
    Enabling default SPI flash mode...
    Configuring flash size...
    Auto-detected Flash size: 4MB
    Erasing flash...
    Took 1.30s to erase flash block
    Wrote 411648 bytes at 0x00000000 in 39.8 seconds (82.7 kbit/s)...

    Leaving...
    Hard resetting via RTS pin...

  5. Enable WiFi on a smartphone or PC, and connect to the SSID ESP_0 using the password configesp
  6. Set the SSID of the WiFi network where the device will be connected, and associated WiFi password, then click on Connect button.
  7. At this point, the device will be associated to the selected WiFi network with the given SSID an password.
  8. Scan the network to find the IP address of the device, and connect to it using a browser: http://DEVICE_IP_ADDRESS
  9. Configure the main parameters:
    creDomESP1 config1
  10. Set the GPIO default configuration:
    creDomESP1 config hardware
  11. Configure devices (e.g. temperature sensors):
    creDomESP1 config device
    creDomESP1 config devices
  12. If the two blue LEDs on the NodeMCU board are annoying you, you can remove them, of course: in this case you avoid extra power consumption for useless LEDs.