Monday 9 January 2023

TTMMGH #00007

Have you ever had one of those experiences that make you feel stoooooopid? 

There's an EDIT to this! A bit more research suggests that there's a bit of an issue.

I did. I'll set the scene. I wanted a quick web interface to a solid state relay and to check a voltage. What have I got that has wifi, an analog input, and a digital out pin, and can run on the sniff of an oily rag? 

(Fossicks around in the parts drawers, yay there's a D1 Mini from a couple I bought a few years ago, yayyyy problem solved! I rock!)

I'd also reinstalled the Arduino.cc IDE for the third time, and this time finally got rid of anything old that it could somehow convince itself was a valuable library that I must have put in the recycle bin because it was so good. Or whatever it'd done the first two times that made it glacially slow and continuously use libraries that seemed to just appear under roaming profiles and whatever. 

So I did the mumbo-jumbo, added the juju juice, whatever it is you need to do. 

#include <ESP8266WiFi.h>
//.........(etc).........
const char* ssid = "blahblah";
const char* password = "passpass"; 

All the way to:  

void setup() {
  Serial.begin(115200);
  WiFi.begin(ssid, password);
  while (WiFi.status() != WL_CONNECTED) {
    delay(500);
    Serial.print(".");
  }

Uploaded it and:

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  forever.

This after a frustrating week where the IDE had taken up to 12 minutes to start up, 6 minutes to compile 15 lines of code and have a meltdown about missing .h files, then take 15 minutes to uninstall itself, then another 15 to install a new downloaded version, then rinse and repeat.

So I was about ready to throw things in the bin. HURL things in the bin. At velocity and with great force. And I looked at the D1 Mini (and the two others that have been sitting in that drawer for years waiting for the perfect project) and made a discovery. 

I have never heard of a D1 Mini without Wifi before...

Apparently I got royally conned, or bought these three for some other project, or just plain messed up when ordering. In fact I had no idea that you could buy a D1 Mini without wifi . I still don't believe it, this is one of those camera pranks, right? 

EDIT: No! New news to hand suggests that there was a crop of V3.0.0 boards that didn't connect to Wifi, and I can also (after a bit more experimenting) say that a particular string I use to keep verison numbers needs to be declared differently between the D1Mini V3.0.0 and other ESP8266 / ATmega328P boards. So now I feel a bit less stupid. But still just as conned.😼


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