ESP8266 WiFi Color Display Kit

I really like this kit! At first, I was a little put off at the cost. But after researching the parts, I realized that if obtained domestically in the US, they add up to just under the cost of this kit. And that is without the Wemos interface board. Sure, you could get the parts from overseas and pay a bit less and get them in 30 days or more, but I wanted to play with this tech now and Amazon Prime got it to me within a couple of days.The kit also includes some hardware that gives you mounting options. After “dry” assembling a few configurations, I decided that I wanted to keep the SD card mount which also allowed me to use the female socket headers to insert the display into. Being a guy that likes to prototype, I wanted the clean option of removing the display easily to use with beefier hardware with more I/O. The ESP32 perhaps. Hmm. There are two spacers and 4 screws included for this option. I would have preferred four spacers and 8 screws so I could solidly mount the interface board with the display. I had more on my bench so no worries. Also included is a nice set of headers to accommodate other options. I was impressed!The interface board is solid and took to soldering well. The mounting holes were a perfect fit to the display and that was an awesome plus! My only complaint would be that there should be some additional printing on the board indicating what the first display pin would be. Not all the pin descriptions, just the first pin. This way, the end-user knows that the board is oriented correctly and not flipped upside down. I had to do a bit of research to determine my dry-run layout was correct. And the seller was awesome in quickly addressing a question of mine by linking a site showing the connections. Two thumbs up!!The Wemos is a fully functional D1 Mini Pro and has 16mb! That gives you tons of creative room for enhancements! I planned to rewrite everything to meet the needs of my project, that needed a touch screen and to be wifi connected so I was pleased with the processing power. If I had a complaint, it would be that the only pins left after interfacing with the TFT, is the serial pins, an analog pin (A0), and a digital pin (D0). That does not leave much room for expansion to sensors, etc. Not a design flaw though, just a limitation and workable. So long as I can attach an interrupt to D0 status change, I’m good. I have not tested that yet.The software setup was almost in-sync with the online instructions at github and other places. Maybe I missed a step with the instructions and ended up using an older version of the Arduino package, but it did not work as expected out of the box. I had to make a couple of modifications to the main ino code. There was an undeclared function that needed to be prototyped, and I had to add a wifi.disconnect to the wifi_connect function. Why? Because after uploading an updated sketch, the weather application would not connect to my wireless network unless I cycled the power. With the disconnect addition though, it worked like a charm!Additionally, with the sketch, the settings.h file was very convenient! The whole project is pretty well written. With MY version (remember that it might not be the latest and a mistake in versioning on my part), the time settings were all setup for Zurich. I had to adjust them for the US and although I do not fully understand the parameter meanings with the DST library, in the end I found that changing the GMT adjustment was what finally allowed the time to be displayed on my device as it is on my computer. And right down to the second too. NICE!! It is also important to note, and the settings.h file recommends this in the comments... TEST YOUR WUNDERGROUND API KEY on a browser, to see what the JSON has to offer. This is critical and proved to be a major stumbling block for me as I omitted that step. It turned out that the city I was setting in the variable did not have “_” (no quotes) for spaces between words, as in “SAN_TAN_VALLEY” for “San Tan Valley”. And finally, change the country code to the STATE abbreviation. I had to change what I set “US” to “AZ”, the state in the US where I live. After I did this and updated, the display lit up with all my weather data as expected. If you do not have these set correctly, you will get question marks in your weather data. Maybe I will write a validation function that fixes that.The settings.h file also has constants for your wireless network login information.I cannot speak for the seller, but I do not believe this kit was meant to be a 100% out of the box working project for weather. Rather, it is a fully functional Wemos ESP8266 controlled touch TFT display. And for that, it does it very well, with smart components selected! And at a very reasonable price! I am very impressed and happy with this purchase!! I just scratched the surface on what is possible with this gear through my sketches or modifications and it is a great building base for that geek that envisions touch control panels and wireless connectivity for all their embedded projects. INVENT! ENJOY!

There's a lot of functionality for very little costs. The "kit" is nearly complete - only the interconnecting pin blocks need to be soldered to the respective circuit boards to get it all to snap together. My kit came up with 2 pin connectors that aren't even needed.There's no real documentation with the kit. You need to go online and look at the videos / instructions. I also downloaded the sample weather app with is a very large and program! It will require some tweaking of the separate settings file and you'll need to set up a free account for the real-time weather data, but it all works well.I used the sample program as a starting point. I kept it in the device and just added extra code and a new front screen. My custom app is designed to connect to a had radio over its IP connection. Once it connects, I used my custom code to issue macro commands that are beyond the functionality of the radio's built-in buttons and switches. No problems with the hardware, and there seems to be plenty of room for even largish- apps! For the price you can't beat it!!!!!

I received this kit and began trying to assemble it, only to discover that the kit that I was trying to put together in the "How To" guide contained parts that were completely different from the kit I was sent. As a result, I could never find out how to properly assemble it.Then I discovered that there is no contact email to get assistance and that the online forum for ThingPulse is no longer accepting registrations. Not a good sign.I finally just pieced the kit together enough so that I could upload the code that ThingPulse provided via GitHub, only to discover that their code had multiple errors and would not compile.I am not a newcomer to working with electronic kits such as this, having successfully built many other Arduino kits. But this one is a complete bust. I would not recommend this to anyone who doesn't have a good background in electronics, as you will essentially have to re-engineer everything on your own.