Wiieva: esp8266 + uGFX + stm32

[olegator]

Hi,

At the end of 2014, then esp8266 has been just arrived, i decided to make universal IoT device with speech recognition, speaker, screen and set of another useful peripherals
It's core is esp8266 - very cheap SoC with built-in WiFi and very strong community support. I hope, you knows about it. Unfortunately esp8266 has few pins and ports, so it's need an companion MCU for peripherals handling, and i got stm32f105rbt8 for this purposes.
As final stage of development i looked to GUI library. I have tried big set of alternatives, but finally found, that uGFX is the best one  

Here is some videos.

All GUI of sample was created and edited with uGFX studio, and is working in Arduino-esp8266 environment without any "hands" editing of uGFX Studio generated c/h files. It's big advantage: Possible to edit GUI at any time in uGFX studio, then just press "Generate" button in uGFX studio, then simple rebuild&deploy project, and see GUI changes. True WYSWYG  

Here is github repo with sample project.
https://github.com/wiieva/examples/tree/master/wiieva-intro

Schematics are here:

https://github.com/wiieva/schematics

 

 

Edited August 17, 2016 by olegator

[Joel Bodenmann]

Wow! This is an amazing project! 
I'm really not sure what to say. This is something you don't see very day. Are you planning on selling the hardware? Can we get one already?  
Please keep us up to date about this project. We hope that you will make more demos & videos. We'd love to include those in the demos section of our website.
This project is definitely worth spreading. Personally I was never interested in all that IoT stuff because most of the things I saw so far weren't that appealing to me. But this gets my full attention.

 

1 hour ago, olegator said:

Unfortunately esp8266 has few pins and ports, so it's need an companion MCU for peripherals handling, and i got stm32f105rbt8 for this purposes.

May I ask what your considerations were to choose this microcontroller at the end? As far as I know there are Cortex-M4 based STM32F4 versions available with the same package. Just a tiny bit more expensive but with two or three times the performance (depending on the application).

 

1 hour ago, olegator said:

As final stage of development i looked to GUI library. I have tried big set of alternatives, but finally found, that uGFX is the best one  

We are very happy to hear that. Thank you for choosing µGFX  

 

1 hour ago, olegator said:

It's big advantage: Possible to edit GUI at any time in uGFX studio, then just press "Generate" button in uGFX studio, then simple rebuild&deploy project, and see GUI changes. True WYSWYG  

This is amazing! I didn't know that the µGFX-Studio would already be advanced enough to use it for something like this.
Too bad that the current version is still somewhat limiting and doesn't offer all available widgets. We need to get the new µGFX-Studio v0.2 out as soon as possible!

[olegator]

Hi Joel,

Thank you for feedback. I am also happy to hear it

Yes, i am planning to selling hardware, and even already started production of first small test batch. My manufacturer is promising, what it will be ready in ~4 weeks. Pls be patient  
Right now there few prototype boards, which i have assembled myself.

IoT is just modern word, which actually can be replaced with classic "embedded device with internet connectivity". 

8 hours ago, Joel Bodenmann said:

May I ask what your considerations were to choose this microcontroller at the end? As far as I know there are Cortex-M4 based STM32F4 versions available with the same package. Just a tiny bit more expensive but with two or three times the performance (depending on the application).

You right, STM32F405RGT6 is in the same package (and even probably can be used without pcb changes)  - but it's more expensive. The price difference between STM32F105 and STM32F405 is $5. $5 is ~%15 of total device cost. It is pretty significant.
Yes, Cortex M4 is 3x more powerful, and have more memory, but in my device architecture the STM32 is co-processor, which role is handle peripherals and audio encoding/decoding. Cortex M3 performance is enough for this tasks.

Btw, user applications and uGFX are running on ESP8266, which is 160Mhz clocked (~200DMIPS - which is near with STM32F405 performance), and have 4Mb of flash. 

9 hours ago, Joel Bodenmann said:

This is amazing! I didn't know that the µGFX-Studio would already be advanced enough to use it for something like this.

Main difficult is in environment setup, and planning application architecture. So, if uGFX studio will offer some applications templates (e.g. like my sample), then it will be easy for any users to do that )

 

9 hours ago, Joel Bodenmann said:

Too bad that the current version is still somewhat limiting and doesn't offer all available widgets. We need to get the new µGFX-Studio v0.2 out as soon as possible!

Agree! I am wating for it

 

[Joel Bodenmann]

1 hour ago, olegator said:

Yes, i am planning to selling hardware, and even already started production of first small test batch. My manufacturer is promising, what it will be ready in ~4 weeks.

I'm glad to hear that you are already in the process of manufacturing. Nice work!
Please keep us up to date.

 

1 hour ago, olegator said:

Btw, user applications and uGFX are running on ESP8266, which is 160Mhz clocked (~200DMIPS - which is near with STM32F405 performance), and have 4Mb of flash. 

Oh, I have missed that, sorry! That explains how you managed to get that GUI run so smoothly. I was wondering what kind of magic you applied to run it that smoothly with the voice recognition and everything on an STM32F105