The Wemos or Geekcreit board

Thanks to a thread started by @gulshan a while back I learned about these Mega boards that have a built-in ESP8266 chip.    I instantly ordered two of them from Banggood at dirt cheap prices.   I must say that it took them forever to get here, over a month.  In fact, I was just about to chalk them up to a total loss thinking they would never show up.  But alas they did show up today.  Not very well packaged either.   But in surprisingly good shape considering the poor packaging.   These boards are fantastic in terms of quality as far as I can tell. They appear to be very well made.   A couple bent pins due to the bad packaging, but nothing serious.  I was able to straight everything back up to like-new condition.  The silkscreening and soldering on the boards is superb.  It's a shame they don't pack them a little better for shipment.  Any, they finally arrived and I just test them and they appear to work so far.   The price was right.  $18 for two of them from Banggood.  Walmart wants $25 jut for one board.  So it was worth the wait.

So what's the big deal?  Well it's just a Mega 2560  and an ESP8266  built on a single board.  Give the Mega built-in WiFi  capabilities.   Although I haven't actually tried out the WiFi  yet.   Today I just wanted to see them work.

There is a  DIP switch in the middle of the board that is used to select different configurations.  To obvious settings are for connecting either the Mega or the  ESP to  the USB port for serial com & program uploading.   So that's the first thing I tested.  I just programmed each Mega Board with a simple Blink routine along with some serial data to  print to the monitor.   They programmed just like any normal Mega (assuming you have the DIP  switch set right)

Then I programmed the ESP chips.  Again pretty straight forward.  Just got to have the DIP  switch set correctly.  There is also a slight twist for the ESP chip.  There are two different DIP  switch settings.  One for programming mode, and one for RUN mode.     

I also programmed a double blink routine into the ESP  chip using GPIO pins 0 &  2.    These pins are made available for  use from a 14 pin  header in the center of the board.   So I'm lighting up two different LEDs alternatively with those two GPIO pins.   I think there are even more GPIO pins available on the ESP chip.

The DIP switch can also be set up so that the  Mega and  ESP can talk to each other  via a  serial com.  And there is even a  switch to choose between different serial coms.   So it's a pretty versatile little board.  I'll be trying out the WiFi connection tomorrow and  also see if I can get the  Mega and ESP communicating with each other.

 Pretty cool board. ?