This here is an esp8266.
It's been rocking the internet of things world.
It's a single chip that houses a computer and an integrated 802.11 wifi engine.
It makes it so this little chip can connect to your home network and perform a whole array
of tasks which is really awesome.
Many times, people will buy them in these modules becuase the modules themselves can
be FCC approved.
So, this video is going to show a range test between this and a home router is like.
But, one thing in testing this that I thought was pretty cool was when you connect one to
the other.
And, if you're curious about that, you can click this video right here.
I'm here, at hollins ferry road in Halethorpe, Maryland.
And thanks, Jesse for doing my camera work here.
She's the person who got the T-shirt made for me.
And, a lot of people have wondered how do the newer ESP modules communicate - and in
particular, I wanted to know how much better is the ESP-12-F better than the ESP-12- uuh
ESP-12-F than the ESP-12-E. Because they advertise so much better range, 4 layer process.
All this whiz bang stuff and I don't know if I believe it or not.
So, here I have an ESP-12-F and an ESP-12-E and I have this one layer glass circuit board
full of awful that I decided to do and I have an ESP on it and whatnot.
This here is an ESP-12-E. And, you can tell because it's actually got the antenna part
that goes across the bottom there instead of a whole bunch of vias.
So, the ESP-12-E was basically one of the first good form-factor ESP8266 carrier modules
that was FCC approved.
This here is an ESP-12-F. It has a number of claims of improved properties to it, but
one of those was a claim that it has better RF capabilities and I don't know.
I'm skeptical.
So, we're gonna take these two down this long road here and test them.
Additionally, we'll be testing this design here.
So, this is a really awful glass circuit board with an ESP8266 on it and an itty bitty just
terrible terrible tiny antenna I mean that thing is tiny.
It's a 1206 size.
There's no way this thing is gonna be any good, but you know what?
Let's just see how much does this RF design and proper engineering really matter in the
grand scheme of things?
So, here I have the ESP module connected up by serial to my laptop here and I'm just watching
it.
So, this module is reporting whether or not a packet is sent from this module to that
TP-Link up there and back to the module.
And, in that event, it will put a little X there which means that this thing is currently
communicating to the base station.
Additionally, it shows the receive power, the RSSI from the base station, so whenever
the base station sends this things a packet, this thing says "Ah, I got a packet and its
last power was 55 or whatver db."
One of the interesting things you can already see is very small changes can cause significant
changes in the RSSI So, even from here, 44, to 52 53 54 that's a significant amount of
power difference, and it's over just a few inches.
And if you're curious a little more about why that is you can click this video right
here.
That's also one of the reasons you can't use receive power to determine localization for
things.
So, sorry anyone who might think you would be able to use this to figure out where you
are.
Any rate, I'm going to take this, connect it up to that base station and using a GPS
app on my phone, determine how far this guy can talk to that and so first up is the ESP-12-F.
So, now I'm just gonna start walking down this road here and we'll see how far I get.
So, I was just walking and at 210 meters I got a dropped packet or two.
I'm trying to find an orientation of an antenna where it will drop some packets, so I'm going
to have to say in open air uuh this thing is at least as good.
OOp.
some more dropped packets there.
Any time the X doesn't display is a dropped packet.
Understand that this thing is actually using broadcast, so 802.11 the standard would retry,
normally, but we're not doing that, so even if it's just dropping a single packet you
don't see it.
But, uuh yeah, 210 meters and it's just starting to drop packets.
Let's see how much further this thing can go.
Right now we're at 336 meters.
It's kind of iffey.
It's still working, still talking uum but you can see a lot of times, a lot of orientations
of this it just kind of drops out so, it's kinda iffey.
I don't think I would want to try to use this past 336 meters here.
Just barely working.
Most of the packets are being dropped in almost any orientation.
We're up to 445 meters and it's just barely working.
I guess I'll go a little bit further but I think it's about to drop.
Ooh got a few more packets here but it's about to drop.
Oh!
It tried to re-associate but I don't think it's gonna go.
So I'd say 470 meters is just the absolute limit.
It's not getting an IP again.
It's disassociated.
Yeah, we're done.
474 meters for this ESP-12-F.
We'll go back and try again with the 12-E. Okay.
So, let's try this again with the ESP-12-E. So, supposedly, this is not as good RF-wise,
or something, and we'll just see how far this thing talks.
Same deal, same setup.
X means it got the packet and the RSSI power.
And, just like before, a couple of inches difference can mean a huge difference in the
RX power, so let's take this thing on a trip.
For the ESP-12-E.
We're only at 250 meters here and already we're getting some trouble.
Umm I guess we'll just keep going and see how good it is.
So, at least my first impression is maybe it's not as good.
Maybe there is something to this whole RF design thing.
Well, I got a couple packets here at 425.
Yeah, it just dropped out.
Yeah, I think this one here, 425 is about its limit.
A while back, I had a single layer glass cirucit PCB with an ESP on it.
I thought it's just something you can not do on a single layer.
Turn out I was wrong and it was a really simple thing.
You're going to have to look at the next video I'm releasing to find out what made this work.
At any rate, I have this and it is a single layer board with an ESP8266 on it and an itty
bitty ceremic antenna.
It's the little blue thing right there.
And, the design of this is just plain awful.
It's not even a double layer board so there's no ground isolation and on top of that there's
a big ground plane running right behind the antenna.
Everything about this board is just wrong.
So, let's see how well this thing does.
Okay.
So, this single layer board I did to have 12 WS2812B LEDs, so Umm it's still running
the software that pings there and receives the response.
That's what these three LEDs are.
But, I can still send it some packets and make it do some other things like this pretty
little design here.
Whoops.
Aww yeah.
/Jesse: I feel uncomfortable/ We're only at 139 meters and we're already getting some
drops here.
Actually a lot of drops there.
Yeah, I guess it's orientation dependent.
Everything is wrong, so, but yeah, I don't think this is going to go nearly as well as
the other ones did.
Like my wifi cup video, if this thing goes out of range, the lights get dimmer.
So, already you can see whenever that thing is not getting its packets back this thing
starts to fade out.
And it's been spending a lot of time off.
Not very much time on.
So, 226 meters really not all that many packets getting through.
So, it's not very good here, but it's kinda getting through.
If all you needed to do was get a current or a temperature reading or something you
could probably do it from here even with this awful design and we're at 303 meters.
I guess we'll see when it drops.
Yeah.
We're at 352 meters and it's pretty much tapped.
It's just not coming back in.
It dropped and that was it.
So, I don't know the really awful design really does not work as well as the really good designs,
but it's still interesting to see that you can in fact do this on a single layer without
any kind of good engineering or anything.
So, I think I'm going to be making a lot more single layer ESP8266 designs.
Maybe even some more glass circuit boards with ESPs.
Up next is where we try to link one ESP to another ESP and see how far they can go.
And it's acting like a wireless router.
So I can connect to it with this guy, just like I did, my laptop a moment ago, and this
guy is connected to it.