Despite baaaarely working at all in the Espressif line of chips, I've done a lot of things on the hardware side, because I like the idea of having wifi in everything. Most of it has been a steady progression forward, to more and more interesting PCB design problems.

The first dev board I made for them is a LiPo charger for an ESP8266 module, dubbed Sugar Glider (for obvious reasons.

The circuit part of this was pretty hastily thrown together, and didn't really have all the features or cost optimisations I would have liked. So, eventually, I did a test board for rev 2. There isn't a proper write-up for this yet, because it's totally not done.

As you can see from the soldering job that looks like it was done with a Bic lighter, it had some issues and needed some rework and design fixes. That is totally to be expected, that's why it's a test!

Test 2 with all the fixes is still on the slow boat:

Should arrive by the end of August, and hopefully I'll be able to conclusively prove the circuit. I say hopefully, because I've already ordered the uMesh boards from OSHPark, and they should be arriving at almost exactly the same time as these, due to the faster shipping.