So, on April first, I posted kind of a fools day video saying I found Ethernet hardware
inside this ESP.
No, there's no Ethernet hardware inside the ESP.
But, you can totally just talk 10BASE-T Ethernet it in software without any problems.
This here is one of the little demo boards that I have with the driver and magnetics
and a little uuh jack on the end.
This totally talks ethernet and it's almost legit.
But, there's totally a jankier way of doing it, such as with this board right here.
This board, all I have is an ethernet plug wired up to some resistors and capacitors
and the ESP.
Actually did a lot more research with this over the last one day, and found out I can
do things a lot better on even this jankey board.
Whereas before I was getting like 60% packet loss, now it's significantly better.
Now, I can ping - err - actually let's just visit the page right now.
It would be, this is the console.
And we can see that loaded fairly quickly, and the rate that that's updating at is almost
as fast as the other one, if not as fast.
Let's see here.
It's around 700 Hz.
So, even on the janky board which I recommend not using, it's still updating very quickly.
You can still use the same sort of features with the "last packet" what I didn't show
though was the GPIO feature.
I can click these GPIOs here and they will click the LEDs on and off on the ESP board
right next to me.
So if you want to look at that?
See how it's blinking on and off?
Wheee I'm an LED.
And if you look back at the screen I can click this little button right here and it's bi-directional.
So, this is just an example of something you can do, stright through Ethernet with the
ESP.
This is with the wifi on my laptop completely totally disabled.
So, it's not like I'm cheating or anything.
That's not really what I wanted to show you, though.
What I wanted to show you was - sure, we can actually ping it, but.
There's something neat.
In a previous video I showed you how I can use an antenna to get rid of some extra noise.
Turns out the anteanna's not needed ever since I realized you could put a capacitor on the
input, but, I left it there for something interested.
So, I'm using ping with a specific pattern.
If I change the pattern, you don't hear anything.
But if I make it 0x00, you can hear it.
But you might wonder "Why can we hear it?"
Over here, Adam's laptop, we're running a RTL-SDR, and we're looking at 150 MHz on just
the AM band.
And, uuh, what we're actually reciving is some of the noise that's coming off of that
stupid wire.
150 MHz noise which is totally outside the band of what we're after.
So, I thought that's interesting, we can actually go create sound with every single packet.
I'm actually sending these packets, so it's around a 500Hz tone.
What I can do from here, though is I've modified cnping, it's a tool that shows network uptime
and what not, to be able to be controllable on the fly.
This is available woah this is available on the github for cnping, but right here you
can see right here that as the packets go on by, the good packets, the bad pakets, they
scroll from left to right.
I can control the size of the packet "EPS" so I can make the payload of the packet huge,
1400 bytes, or really small, only 6, and from left to right I can control the speed that
it's pinging the packets out.
Now it's sending out a new packet every 4ms, whoops, around 4ms, and you can kinda hear
- let me turn it up here - a little clearer - you can kinda hear is if I change the speed
in which I'm pinging it changes the uuh the pitch.
I can also lock the frequency and change the size of the packets.
And you can get this interesting PWM tone feel.
Also, you can see as I use larger packets, it takes longer for the ESP to respond to
them.
So, if I start transmitting 13 or 14 hundred byte packets it takes it almost 3-4 ms to
actually go respond to those packets.
One of the neat things is in this mode, with the PWM, I can go change that, but I can also
play notes.
♫ Annoying beeps ♫
The way this is working is because this thing right here is sending out pings to the ESP8266
there's a whole lot of extra noise on the line that's creating a lot of disruption that's
being created in the AM band which is being picked up by the RTL-SDR, sitting over here.
So, this is kind of an interesting way we can almost "Hear" the Ethernet packets.
Well, I hope to make some more video about the ESP8266 and ethernet - cause now that
it can actually do it - go figure, why not?
Hope you guys liked it.
It's going to be a freebie for all the Patreon people - so - stay tuned.