WH, good to hear of your experience with that board. As I've mentioned, I've not played with ESP8266 for over a year, due to past unreliability experiences with those devices, and also to concentrating on the RFM radios. Also, people have found that in general there is too much latency with using wifi to control robots. You need quick turnaround responses.
However, someone who has been having luck with the ESP8266 might try it on the same Moteino board with RFM radio, and check for interference problems.
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Also, I thought I would toss out one more picture, in regards ideas that might be incorporated into a possible Moteino gateway board.
I designed the board shown below a year ago, as a general "all-purpose" small RF node. I don't have a current picture of a built-up pcb, but this shows the actual top-bottom layout [bottom traces are in blue, so you're in effect looking "through" the board at the bottom, :-)]. 1.5"x2.5", mega328 DIP chip, 3-row headers for robot sensors/servos, DPAK 3.3V 1A regulator although a micro-power v.reg can be soldered in, layout for both XBee socket and also pads [in red] for RFM radios on top inbetween the XBee pads. The FTDI dongle plugs in next to the cpu.
The points I wanted to make are that I've set this up to handle all sorts of customization:
- HDR3 is a 2x8 (uncommitted) header that allows me to mount nRF2401 and ESP826 radios, 128x160 LCDs, sensors like an MPU6050 accelerometer/gyro board, etc.
- so overall, it can handle any of XBee, RN-XV, RFMxx, ESP8266, and nRF2401 radios.
- SOIC8 layout for Flash chip, plus another (uncommitted) SOIC18 layout on the bottom that can mount 2/ea SOIC8s for expansion.
- 2x15 proto area and 3-row headers.
The tiny proto area can mount MOSFETs, voltage-dividers for ADC channels, SIL sensors, even DIP8 opAmps. So, this is another "Do Everything" board that can be customized for specific applications. It can even drive a minimalist robot. So, I just thought some of these features might be incorporated into a Moteino-Gateway pcb, especially the 2x8 uncommitted header and the tiny proto area. An UNO-size board with mega1284 SMT cpu would have lots of free space.
It occurred to me that, for cost-savings reasons, much of this area could be left vacant and people could solder in their own customizations. Moteino is a hardware-hacker world, after all :-).