The ePulse Feather

The Color Kit Grande is the sum of many things Marcel and I learned in the last couple of years. We replaced the NodeMCU from the Classic Kit and the Wemos Mini from the Color Kit with our own ESP32 ePulse Feather. As the name indicates the ePulse Feather follows Adafruit’s Feather specification. The ePulse Feather is also very efficient when it comes power consumption: it only consumes down to 12uA when in deep sleep! A true IoT dev board should be powered by batteries and the ePulse Feather allows this with a LiPo charger and connector. And it uses the powerful ESP32 microcontroller which is a big upgrade compared to the ESP8266. More RAM, more flash, more cores, more possibilities!

The Display Module

But not only the microcontroller board got better compared the the older Color Kit. We also added a better display module. It communicates over SPI with the ePulse Feather to change the pixels on the display. The added PSRAM memory of the ePulse Feather allows us to write better looking programs with more colors!

We also replaced the (ancient) resistive touch screen with a capacitive module. This is the same technology that you know from modern smartphones and tablets and is much more precise and intuitive to use.

The Connector Board

The ESP8266 Color Kit was the first of my kits to include a custom component and it required you to solder pin headers. The Color Kit Grande still has such a PCB which we call connector board. But this time we offer you various difficulties of soldering. There is a power switch with classic through hole soldering and a wide pin pitch with enough space for even a wide soldering tool.
The pin headers for the ePulse Feather are in 2.54mm pitch and are a bit more delicate but still not too hard for a beginner. We also added a Grove connector to connect to a wide range of sensors and actors using the same system. And the Grove connector is surface mounted which again is a bit more complicated to solder.

The Kit Box

Even with the kit box we learned from our older products: both the Classic Weather Station and the ESP8266 Color Kit came in a box which is 4cm high. This was sometimes problematic for shipping and added extra costs. The Color Kit Grande box is only 2cm high and everything fits neatly in it. The box even serves as a stand. How cool is that?

The New Weather App

Not only the hardware is new, we also rewrote the popular weather app from scratch. More memory and more CPU power means that we have more colors to play with. To make setup of the development environment as easy as possible we decided to use platformio and Visual Studio Code. While the Arduino IDE is very good for beginners it makes it hard to ensure that every maker has the same setup on his/her machine. With platformio we can define the exact versions of libraries you use. No conflicts because of old and outdated dependencies! Just do the required changes in the settings.h file and upload the firmware!

Where to buy

The Color Kit Grande is available at the ThingPulse web shop. As you might know, I founded ThingPulse together with Marcel back in 2018 to professionalize the distribution of the projects posted on this blog. Since then we developed many new products together which are also available in the shop.

Coupon: For the readers of my blog I have a special treat! Use the coupon code SQUIX-CKG to save USD $5 when buying a Color Kit Grande in the ThingPulse Shop. Valid until July 31, 2023

Links

• Color Kit Grande Shop Page
• Assembly and programming instructions
• Weather Station Touch on Github

To get an idea how a color version of the Weatherstation would look like I got a little creative and designed a image mockup and uploaded it to the ESP-TFT combo. This is just a static image for now but the images, fonts and colors could look exactly like that, except for anti- aliased fonts. Leave me a comment if you like it!

First you’ll have to install or update the library and make sure that you have at least version 1.1.1 installed. Then you can simply go to

Files > Examples > ESP8266 Weather Station > PlaneSpotterDemo

And you’ll have a template for your own PlaneSpotter project. Read the original article for more detail.

Bethsalem presented a nice and simple enclosure for the PlaneSpotter over at RadarSpotting. Thank you for sharing!

BTW: this project is also mentioned in my new eBook: ESP8266 Weather Station: Getting Started Guide

Adapting the code

So how do you get those displays working with the WeatherStation or the PlaneSpotter? The OLED library makes that really easy: you just have to change two lines of code. The include for the SH1106 driver has to be included and then the instantiation. Find the line

#include <SSD1306Wire.h>

and replace it with

#include <SH1106.h>

The next step is to replace the instantiation of the driver:

SSD1306Wire display(I2C_DISPLAY_ADDRESS, SDA_PIN, SDC_PIN);

and replace it with:

SH1106  display(I2C_DISPLAY_ADDRESS, SDA_PIN, SDC_PIN);

Done! Easy, wasn’t it? The OLED library supports other types of displays or communication protocols. You kind out more about them here:
https://github.com/squix78/esp8266-oled-ssd1306

Summary

With changing just a few lines you can get the WeatherStation and the PlaneSpotter working on the bigger 1.3″ screens. The cost a little bit more but depending on your casing they are worth the money. By the way: the pixel density (DPI) is actually worse with the 1.3″ displays since both types have the same resolution of 128×64 pixels. You can find the displays on AliExpress, eBay or on Banggood and support the Blog by following this link.

References

• https://github.com/squix78/esp8266-weather-station
• https://github.com/squix78/esp8266-oled-ssd1306
• 1.3″ OLED display on Banggood
• 0.96″ OLED display on Banggood
• WeatherStation Project Post
• PlaneSpotter Project Post

The WeatherStation case

Integration into my interphone

OpenScad Design of the case

Got inspired? Order the development kit here:

https://blog.squix.org/product/weatherstation-kit-w-white-oled for US $24.50

Thank you Dennis for sharing!