Cactus Micro Arduino compatible plus WIFI esp8266

Name: Cactus Micro Arduino compatible plus WIFI esp8266
SKU: 4449
Price: 11.00 USD
Availability: Discontinued
Rating: 4.09 (8 reviews)

(8 Reviews)

Cactus Micro tiny size Arduino board plus WIFI chip esp8266

Designed by AprilBrother in China

Product Retired

This product is no longer available for sale.

The seller may be offering an improved version or it may be hanging out on the beach, enjoying the retired life.

While you're here, check out these other awesome products for sale!

Visit Store

More From AprilBrother:

A4 button with WiFi connection and magnet charger

AprilBrother

$12.90

nRF52810 Wristband iBeacon Eddystone Tech

AprilBrother

$7.00

WUD v1.2: WiFi USB disk-Original manufacturer

AprilBrother

$16.00

Cactus WHID: WiFi HID Injector USB Rubberducky

AprilBrother

$19.90

More From Arduino

Louder ESP32

Sonocotta

$24.00

Rabbit-Labs™ - Flux Capacitor - Amplified CC1101

Rabbit-Labs™

$49.22

Rabbit-Labs™ - Multi Pass MagSpoof Flipper Board

Rabbit-Labs™

$33.60

TC4+ Coffee Roaster Shield - TC4 PLUS

Artisanal Technologies

$59.00

Cactus Micro Arduino compatible plus WIFI esp8266 1

Cactus Micro Arduino compatible plus WIFI esp8266 2

Cactus Micro Arduino compatible plus WIFI esp8266 3

2015-03-01T04:14:17.916Z-cactus_pinout.jpg

Welcome to our store. Regular shipping takes about 15-28 days deliver, Any question, please feel free to contact us. skype: aprilbeacon Wechat：13661293819

Cactus Micro tiny size Arduino board plus WIFI chip esp8266

Cactus Micro Rev2 available now! Here's the link. What is it? Cactus Micro is our integrated developement board, we have mixed Arduino with WI-FI into a single board. It is targeted for makers to dev…

What is it?

Cactus Micro is our integrated developement board, we have mixed Arduino with WI-FI into a single board. It is targeted for makers to develop low power Internet-Of-Things (IoT) projects quickly and easily.

Update

15/4/2015 We have upgraded the firmware for esp8266 module to resolve http post bug today .
14/4/2015 We have resolved the issue for HTTP POST and add some examples. Please refer the link.

What makes it special?

Cactus Micro is tiny size Arduino compatible dev board. It's built-in a esp8266 module (esp-11).

Features

Built-in ESP8266 WIFI module
ATmega32U4 running at 3.3V/8MHz
Supported under Arduino IDE 1.0.6
On-Board micro-USB connector for programming
4 x 10-bit ADC pins
12 x Digital I/Os (5 are PWM capable)
Rx and Tx Hardware Serial Connections

Getting Started

Open Arduino IDE and choose board "LilyPad USB" to start playing with your Cactus Micro in just a few easy steps.

How it works

The ESP8266 chip communicates with Atmega32U4 through the SoftwareSerial or Serial (hardware serial port). It can be switched by a jumper. The default port for communicattion is SoftwareSerial port (RX: 11, TX: 12)
The pin 13 is connected to pin CH_PD of ESP8266. Put the pin 13 high to enable ESP8266 chip.

Package contains

Cactus Micro x 1
ESP8266 module (ESP-11) x 1
Male headers (Not soldering) x 1

Quantity	Price
1-4	$11.00
5-9	$10.45
10-19	$9.90
20+	$9.00

Review Breakdown

Average Ratings

Product: (4.12)

Documentation: (3.12)

Shipping: (4.88)

Communication: (4.25)

Alexander | June 26, 2015

Great for anyone getting started with Arduino+ESP8266

I've used a lot of ESP8266 variants and combinations and this particular one is my favorite. It's not really for beginners - you'll want to program the ESP8266 and the Arduino in isolation and then connect them together - a bit more advanced than the usual project. That said, once you get the firmware set up, it's much easier to develop with this combination than it is to develop with just an ESP8266.

Replace the ESP8266 firmware immediately with https://github.com/tuanpmt/espduino for best results - the stock AT firmware is a lot less reliable / much more difficult to use / doesn't have HTTP support, etc.

Sanjee | June 17, 2015

Good hardware but poor documentation

I wanted to use this product as a simpler, cheaper replacement for the Teensy 3.1, but unfortunately the documentation was nowhere near as good and I found it very difficult even connecting to my local wireless network.

Note on the hardware: the ESP8266 is soldered via pins to the Teensy-like board, and there is ~1mm separation between the two boards. Just be aware that in a rough environment, a snag on the ESP8266 could conceivably bnreak the wires (the connection is soldered well).

On the plus side, the Cactus Micro people are quite responsive and, while I moved on to another solution, they did seem to care about helping me debug the problem.

I-Horng | June 16, 2015

Good

1. It takes me couple days to accomplish the testing, I mean the document is not enough and I finally find more on Sparkfun site for my need.
2. ESP8266 uses software AP technique, so its speed may not be very fast for all application. But for my case, it's fast enough.

Marc | May 4, 2015

works as it should

Used 6 modules out of 1o in a workshop, all worked without problems. (4 yet spare)

recommend it.

Aaron | April 27, 2015

Pleasantly surprised. Nice little controller + WiFi

I thought it was going to take a month to get to me, since it was from China. I was wrong! It came in just a few days. This is a neat and capable little package. It's not as powerful or convenient as developing on the Electric Imp platform. But it is cheap and it works. The only problem I found is that the ESP8266 ships with the older firmware, which has a bug that locks the module up. But, not big a deal, thanks to a really handy "hidden feature" of the Cactus Micro package -- the Arduino board can control the ESP8266 module. Specifically, there is an 'Enable' pin that I use to power-cycle the ESP8266 whenever it got stuck. So even if you run into problems, the package gives you a way to automatically recover from it. After that hack, my Cactus is like the Terminator, it goes down sometimes but it always comes back up and keeps transmitting data.

Xavier | April 23, 2015

Nice product but it needs improvements

The product is well manufactured, the idea of being able to plug in/out the ESP8266 module is smart.

The problem is that in the era of IOT, not being able to do a simple HTTP POST request out of the box is a no go for me. After some investigations it seems possible (see: https://github.com/AprilBrother/cactus-micro/issues/1 and http://blog.aprbrother.com/p/303) but in the process I lost the needed patience to test the final solution.

Anyway, it feels like more bumps as we often encounter with a fresh new product rather than unfixable bugs, so I keep on being confident with the product.

The documentation is growing up every day, see: http://wiki.aprbrother.com/wiki/Cactus_Micro and http://blog.aprbrother.com/tag/cactus-micro

I hope I'll find some more time to fiddle with, because the product seems pretty good once passed through the buggy things.

Regards

Joe | April 20, 2015

Good vendor, OK product, one glitch.

I received two units, shipping time was faster than I expected coming to USA from China. First inspection showed a well built device, with the ESP8266 daughter board atop the Arduino compatible motherboard. This is interesting because it allows for the use of the ESP8266 board without the Arduino, if that's desired. The micro usb plug is solid. I spent a week trying to get the Arduino to talk to the ESP through the SoftwareSerial interface as described in the documentation. I did use the recommended Arduino IDE, version 1.0.6. I tried three or four different SoftwareSerial libraries, but none worked. So I contacted the vendor, aprilbrother, who responded within a few hours with the suggestion to increase the Software Serial library buffer size. This didn't work. He then suggested to switch over to the uart interface. This required cutting two tiny jumpers on the back of the board, and connecting the alternate jumpers with solder. No problems there. After this change, everything worked as expected. I was able to create a simple sketch that takes input from the Serial Monitor and sends it to the ESP, as well as send information over the wifi, and receive information from the wifi. I can easily connect to my router, create a tcp client, a tcp server, and deliver info to a browser via http on request. The ESP is flashed for a 9600 baud uart speed. The ATmega32U4 has only 2.5K bytes of RAM, which is used for the stack, strings, and variables, so buffer sizes are somewhat limited. The vendor provides basic documentation for his device, but more is needed. It's available, but takes considerable searching to pull it all together. I'm disappointed that the Software Serial interface didn't work. It would pull up to a hundred characters from the ESP, but then would seem to lose synchronization and deliver gibberish. Same effect if I increased the buffer size to 256. Long commands back to the ESP didn't work either, but short ones did. If you don't need the uart for your application, then it's not an issue. For me, the Serial1 interface has more functionality than Software Serial, so I like it better anyway. Overall, this is a great device if you need small size, short messages back and forth, you're not afraid to solder, and you're willing to do the work to find all the documentation you need. Also, if you're going for a low power application, this device would work if you remove the power on led.

Patrick | April 8, 2015

So Close to Being So Good, Has Fatal Flaws Out of the Box

I was really excited about these, between the low price and the small size, not to mention the ease of programming them thanks to Arduino compatibility, they sounded almost perfect for about a dozen of the things on the "projects I want to work on if I ever have the time" list.

Unfortunately the these are very flawed devices indeed. I should say, the Arduino baseboard part seems to be mostly okay. I did have a few problems getting it to flash at first, removing the WiFi module let me flash it and after flashing it with my own sketch once I was able to flash it with the WiFi module in place. I assume there was some issue with the pre-flashed AT terminal sketch that prevents it from communicating with the Arduino IDE.

The next problem that I had was the lack of documentation. Maybe lack it the wrong word, maybe "thinness". Basically it's spread all over the place. They don't even have any documentation for the AT command set for the WiFi module, they just give you a link to the nurdspace wiki page.

None of these would stop be from recommending this device, the thing that does stop me is it can't actually do HTTP at all. Now you might be thinking "But they have an example that writes data to sparkfun data using HTTP!". Yes, they do have an example that writes data to sparkfun data, but the garbage that it sends isn't HTTP, it's just kinda-sorta http-like enough that sparkfun's servers are able to figure out what it meant (probably mostly by luck). I was very excited when I saw the method for writing out over a TCP socket, you actually tell it how many bytes you're about to send before you send it so there aren't any silly time-based escape codes like some AT command sets have. And it would have been great if they had implemented it properly, but they didn't. For some reason it seems to strip CRLFs ("\r\n") randomly so you can't have newlines between the line in an HTTP header, not all of them and I can't figure out how I'd even work around that. It also doesn't then count what it removes so you end up sending some of your next AT command to the server and have no idea where you are in a command.

This means that for this to be useful you're going to have to setup a build system to build and flash a community firmware to the WiFi module, which I haven't had the time to do yet. And at that point, why not just flash one of the eLua-based firmwares and make it even easier to use and not need the Arduino base board part?

I don't know if I can update these reviews after the fact, but if I can and if I ever find the time I'll let you know if I've found a way to make these useful.

tl;dr: Arduino part is fine. WiFi module is crap and can't handle new lines so can't do anything useful (HTTP).

Response from AprilBrother | April 14, 2015

Thanks for your review. I have update our document for resolve some issues like how to handle new line. If [this link](http://wiki.aprbrother.com/wiki/Cactus_Micro_Tutorial) works, please let me know.

+ Show 3 more