ESPEnvi Puts Espressif's ESP12F to Work Monitoring Temperature, Humidity, and Gas Concentrations

Those looking to build an environmental monitoring system have a new choice of development board, in the form of Niklas Heinzel's ESPEnvi — powered by an Espressif ESP12F module.

"The ESPEnvi or ESPEnvironmental is an ESP12F based developer board, especially for the easy entry into the world of IoT," Heinzel writes. "The board offers a wide range of possible uses for makers, hobbyists and engineers, such as use as a weather station, gas meter, mould preventer, garden shed monitoring and much more."

The compact board is designed specifically for environmental sensing, with an HDC1080 temperature and humidity sensor and MQ-2 gas detector as standard. These are linked to Espressif's ESP12F module, an ESP8266-based device running at up to 160Mhz and with on-board 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi connectivity.

ESPEnvi has built the board with flexibility in mind: While it has a micro USB port for its power input, it's not limited to 5V; rather, it can run from any input ranging as low as 3V up to 11V — and with a claimed 0.02mA deep-sleep current, could run from a battery for some considerable time.

ESPEnvi is now available on Tindie, priced at $30 per unit; the price does not include a power cable, nor the serial cable required for programming via the Arduino IDE.