cc3000

Hi

I'm very interested in using Espruino with CC3000.

1. Are there recommendations on where to buy the module in the UK?

2. How can it be connected - it seems to be surface mount ?

It will be a little unfortunate if we have to pay extra for breakout boards...

Thanks

Martin

Hi Martin,

The module itself is actually a total pain. It's surface mount and has pads on the underside. Most importantly though it has no aerial built-in which means that you actually need to solder it down (probably in an oven) to quite a specialised board design with a ceramic aerial if you want it to work well.

Realistically, once you've bought the module, PCB, aerial, capacitors and resistors you've probably spent more than one of the pre-assembled boards costs.

So for pre-assembled boards it looks like Embedded Adventures is a good bet. They have a UK office and also have the cheapest modules I have found so far: http://www.embeddedadventures.com/cc3000_wifi_module_wrl-3000.html

Note that the prices on their site are ex-vat. They also sell the modules on eBay if you'd rather not hand out your card details to a random website.

Thanks :)

I'll ask them for UK pricing... much appreciated.

Hmm - does that board fit in the prototyping space?

Doh - they have UK pricing on the site. Ordered :)

Just tap USD on the pull-down box in the top-right and click GBP. It's £16.99 (+vat + shipping iirc)

Not sure what you mean about the prototyping space? It's designed as an enthusiast board - if you were making something professional you'd probably just use the CC3000 directly as placing a few extra SMD components won't be the end of the world.

There is a CC3000 breakout from adafruit. You can very easily connect the wires to the arduino if you solder some pin headers. http://www.adafruit.com/products/1469

Now the only problem that I experience is that the CC3000 does seem to have an unstable firmware, e.g. in chatty office environments, it cannot connect or simply crashes. I am also currently trying to figure out how I could recover from such a crash and restart the espruino including the CC3000 again. If anyone has ideas, please let me know.

Just saw this post again. I wanted to add that last time I tried, the Embedded Adventures CC3000 module did not work with Espruino. It didn't even initialise.

Hi, I was wondering what the state of the CC3000 support is. We are looking for ways to get the espruino on the internet and since this one has built in support it seems like a great option!

At the moment it's still a bit flaky with the Adafruit module (I haven't tested the EmbeddedAdventures one but I doubt anything has changed there) - it'll work for hours on end, but if you leave it overnight it will probably have crashed.

There is however the watchdog timer that you can enable that should sort these problems out.

The WIZnet module is also supported for wired ethernet, but it looks like that needs some work too (which I was planning on tackling next week). AFAIK the HTTP server on it works well as long as you use the IP address it's supplied with, but it doesn't cope well if you try and use DHCP.

I have no luck with this module (CC3000) every time I try to run the sample code from the website my entire computer(mac) slowdowns and the board reset itself. I really like this board so I am hoping that this issue will get fix soon. Let me know if there is anything that I can do to help.

Hi Carlos,

Are you using the most up to date version of Espruino, and have you checked that you've got everything wired up as it says on the CC3000 page? I should have updated this thread, but both CC3000 and WIZnet modules are working pretty reliably now.

That's really weird behavior. Could it be a power problem?

Make sure you've got it wired in correctly - you connect VBat of the Espruino to VIn on the CC3000 - you don't connect 3.3v of Espruino to 3v3 on the CC3000 module; the module (At least Adafruit's module does, and I don't think anyone has made other breakout boards work with the Espruino) has it's own regulator that can handle the CC3000's peak current of 350ma (!!).

Ok, I'm looking forward to start using the Espruino again, the whole CC3000 issue was a turn off for me but now it seems that the problem is solved. Thanks guys