IR Wifi Blaster - unable to get Wifi to work

Wireless & IoT Wifi
1

I have been trying to get the IR Wifi Blaster to work with Wifi for a couple of days, and think the problem is with configuration. I have downloaded Arduino 1.8.15, and the hookup instructions are for Arduino 1.8.5. The hookup guide says to select board “Generic ESP8266” and then select options:

Flash size: 4M(1M SPIFFS)

lwIP variant v2 Prebuilt (MSS=536)

CPU Frequency: 80MHz

Flash Frequency: 40MHz

Crystal Freqency: 26MHz

Those options for Flash size and lwIP variant are not available in Arduino 1.8.15 , so I have tried various settings to no avail.

I can get a sketch that doesn’t use WiFi to work, such as IRrecvDump2. But there is no output to the Serial Monitor from any sketch that uses Wifi. This includes existing examples such as WifiClient.

I tried modifying IRrecvDump to use Wifi, and included the lines:

#include <ESP8266WiFi.h>

…

void setup(){

…

WiFi.mode(WIFI_STA)

WiFi.begin(ssid,passwd);

}

With these lines in place I do not see output in the screen monitor when I press the remote, whereas if I comment them out I do.

I note that in the hookup guide undeer the topic “Testing the IR Receiver” it says “Make sure the board is set correctly to NodeMCU 1.0 (ESP-12E Module)” rather than Generic ESP8266.

I have also tried uploading https://github.com/mdhiggins/ESP8266-HTTP-IR-Blaster and encounter a similar problem, except this time it seems to hang as soon as there is serial output and in invoke the wdt.

I have now loaded the same sketch onto a NodeMCU board that I have and it works without problems.

I have also tried the version of IRrecvDump2 modified as above, plus to output a timestamp every 5 seconds. This works on the NodeMCU board and outputs the timestamp, but does not on the IR Wifi Blaster.

I am convinced this is a configuration problem, but don’t see what it is. Any help would be gratefully received.

I am using an FT232R breakout board to upload the sketches to the IR Wifi Blaster.

2

I suspect that the problem is that any WiFi call is causing a large current to be drawn from the power supply. The FT232R board seems uses the onchip regulator of the USB chip which can only deliver 50ma. This isn’t enough for a WiFi chip, so it reboots.

3

Indeed that was it, fixed up a separate power supply now works as expected.

4

Nice work on fixing this one! Hopefully this post will assist others out there running into similar issues.

Cheers!