Contents • • • • • • • Hardware debugging and programming via UART/Serial connection has always been something so vital to hardware developers and even other team players like QA engineers. In certain circumstances, the device that needs to be debugged or programmed is not reachable by wires. I remember how QA engineers in my previous job had to come up with a Bluetooth adapter to bridge the serial debugging information of the tested products because it was fixed inside the car dashboard and can’t be reached out.

In this article, it’s time to make some serial data fly over the air! Serial Bridge Using ESP8266. One of the most well-known (appeared on ) and well-designed projects to make ESP8266 as a WiFi-UART bridge is jeelabs’s. Actually, this project is far beyond being a simple serial bridge as it also manages MQTT client pub/sub and REST HTTP requests in order to connect the MCU to the internet. Moreover, it can be used to flash the attached MCU.

A lot of Engineering projects and tutorials for the students to help them in their final year projects and semester projects. Hello friends, I hope you all are fine and having fun. In today’s tutorial, I am going to show you How to use Arduino Software Serial. In my previous. Introduction to ESP8266 August 10, 2018; Get in Touch. SoftwareSerial Library. The Arduino hardware has built-in support for serial communication on pins 0 and 1. If using multiple software serial ports.

Esp-link has a very handy web interface stored inside the ESP. To make the test, we will use ESP8266 development board, specifically NodeMCU. Prepare The Software. First, we need to download one of the release images of the project from releases.

The compressed file (A.tgz file is beside the download word in bold) should have 5 bin files:blank.bin, boot_v1.x.bin, esp_init_data_default.bin, user1.bin and user2.bin. The ESP8266 board should be connect after downloading one of the available download tools like: from Espressif. Now, follow the flashing guidelines available in according to your ESP8266 edition and set the bin files addresses according to your module memory size. You can simply make the from Espressif find it for you by connecting it and pressing “start” to get the required specification from the boot message.

Alternatively, you can read the boot message using a serial console with 76600 baud. After flashing the image files successfully, you should see a new WiFi network.

Connect to it and type this IP address into the browser. Now, you should see the home page. Prepare The Hardware. To test the serial bridge code, we will achieve the following connection: TX0 from ESP with RX of the device and RX0 with TX of the device that sends serial information and needed to be bridged via WiFi. For the sake of the test, the device here would be a USB-TTL cable (USB-UART converter) and the data will be sent and received from a console ( for instance). Image Courtesy of Now, let’s see some serial data fly over the air! Finally, I think a considered amount of time is needed to explore the other options of this!

Serial Bridge Using ESP8266 (Simpler). ESP32 has many different development boards. The one used here is Image Source: And has the following pinout: Image Source: Espressif Github Repo To test the serial bridge code, we will do the following connection: TX0 from ESP with RX of the device and RX0 with TX of the device that sends the serial information and needed to be bridged via WiFi. For the sake of the test, the device here would be a USB-TTL cable (USB-UART converter) and data will be sent and received from a console (PUTTY for instance). Now download the Arduino and upload it to ESP32.

Choose from Tools>boards>ESP Dev Module. Many things can be configured before uploading the code to ESP32 like choosing the working mode as a station or an access point and many other things.

//#define MODE_STA // ESP connects to WiFi router If no changes are done, the bridge will broadcast a WiFi network with SSID “LK8000” and password “Flightcomputer”. Connect to the WiFi network and open the program then use the following setups: one for the Serial connection for the USB-UART converter. And another to connect to the WiFi server using one of the following IP/Port according to the used UART port. • 192.168.4.1:8880 for UART0 • 192.168.4.1:8881 for UART1 • 192.168.4.1:8882 for UART2 Now, open the two consoles and try the magic!