NodeMCU Introduction

Author : Dinesh Kumar Wickramasinghe

Hi Everyone, Here I am adding a new tutorial series of Node MCU. I have done several projects with PIC Family Microcontrollers and Arduino board. Then the IoT (Internet of Things) came to the world. Basically IoT is a world of Connected Devices. The simple definition of Internet of Things is Networked Physical Devices (Connected Devices).

So what are the devices? Simply your Refrigerator can be a connected device. It reports the status to the internet and you can view these status updates from anywhere in the world. Cloud Computing is another hot topic people talking same as IoT.

In the connected world, we need to connect our devices to the Internet. Let's take a simple example. You need to monitor your home temperature from anywhere in the world. We did a simple temperature monitor project earlier using LM35 and Arduino. Now we need to connect this to the Internet. We can use your Home WiFi network for this. Or else make the connection using Ethernet cable.

In this case you need some additional hardware. To connect Arduino to Ethernet, you need Arduino compatible Ethernet Shield. If WiFi is the option, then you need Arduino compatible WiFi shield.

But let’s forget about all these Shields. Also forget about Arduino as well. Now we have NodeMCU which is an Internet of Things Development board for a cheap price but with more capabilities.

NodeMCU is an open source IoT platform. Basically the NodeMCU uses Lua scripting language to program. But don't worry. Your familiar Arduino IDE also can be used to Program NodeMCU. NodeMCU runs an ESP8266 WiFi SoC from Espressif systems. NodeMCU has a built in WiFi module. That means you can easily connect it to WiFi with few lines of codes.

This tutorial series is about doing some cool IoT Projects with NodeMCU.

There are some different versions of Node MCU modules. I am using the latest version available when I write this article.

Please refer the below PIN Mapping Table as well. It will be helpful for you to understand the pin numbers in the code and the actual GPIO pin numbers.

Node MCU has 4MB of storage and 128 Kb of Memory. It has several GPIO (General Purpose Input Output) pins for device connectivity. It has only one Analogue pin for Analogue input.

I am not going to discuss more technical details here since there are several articles available for your reference. You can find those links in the References section. I believe now you have a basic understanding about the NodeMCU development Board. In the next tutorial I will explain you how to configure the Arduino IDE for Node MCU development and a simple LED Blink example. Thank you all.

References.

• NodeMCU Documentation
• NodeMCU Wikipedia
• More details about setting up
• Pinouts Doagrams