Please make something wireless.

Rena

Active member
Lately I've been dabbling with some projects that involve Wifi and Bluetooth Low Energy, so I've been trying different microcontrollers. First there's ESP8266 for wifi, which has given me nothing but pain - only 5 GPIOs that can actually be used, and they're flaky as heck; crappy closed-source OS; slow, unreliable flashing process; weird bugs that seem to come from nowhere.

Then for Bluetooth I tried a Ti chip, and that's been even worse. Between the super helpful self-destruct "security feature" that bricks the chip if a specific byte in flash isn't a specific value, and the enormously terrible enterprise software, I have yet to even program one successfully.

Teensy is so much easier to use. I can just write bare-metal ARM code, upload it on the command line, and run it, and it does what it should. It's totally reliable and really simple. It's very difficult to brick them, as well; no matter how bad I mess up the code, I can just hit the button and reflash. It's so much easier that part of me has insane ideas about bit-banging wifi signals on the analog pins.

If there were a Teensy with Wifi/BLE capabilities, it would be just amazing.
 
I’m curious how viable this could be on a Teensy 4.1, if I’m not mistaken enough of the pins for SDIO2 are available to use a SDIO based WiFi chip. Other options include using SDIO1 via a micro SD card breakout or trying to reverse engineer a USB WiFi adapter which isn’t easy.
 
Even if it will be "only" an official addon board.
I'm probably missing something, but why does it have to be an "official" addon board? Packing an ESP on a simple T3/4 breakout board and communicate to it via serial doesn't sound difficult?
 
I'm probably missing something, but why does it have to be an "official" addon board? Packing an ESP on a simple T3/4 breakout board and communicate to it via serial doesn't sound difficult?

In my case I’m more interested in getting the most performance out of WiFi while still using a Teensy that I can. It’s certainly more cost effective to go with an ESP, but serial can only handle so much and I’m stuck in my ways.
 
One option we have is to develop a WIFI driver for some standard USB dongle that plugs into either T3.6 or T4.x. My guess is it would be a lot of work, but would be nice.

We do have some bluetooth support currently in. Still somewhat limited and sort held together with bailing wire. That is at some point it needs to understand more of the underlying BT protocols and more intelligent about each message. Currently it is setup to understand what several devices do and mimic what it needs to do to get those running. We were and maybe will get back to enhancing it more when some of us get inspired again.
 
Maybe easier is to develop a program, like AT Mode for the ESP and a Teensy library. Both optimized for each other and for SPI? With 2 chipselects, perhaps, for command+data?
Or, such a thing may exist already?
 
Mm, might be not worth the effort and easier to just use serial @ 6Mbit... no code needed,can use the cheapest esp8266 with default AT Firmware und just works.
Maybe i'll do a tutorial someday...
 
I needed BLE support for my Teensy 4.0 project, rather than deal with 2 mcus i added CANbus support TO ESP32 and have teensy use CAN to control the BLE devices programmed on the ESP32
 
Back
Top