ESP32 vs ESP8266-difference between ESP32 and ESP8266 wifi
This page compares ESP32 vs ESP8266 and mentions difference between ESP32 and ESP8266 wifi based boards. Both similarities and difference between ESP32 and ESP8266 boards are also mentioned.
What is ESP8266 board ?
ESP8266EX houses wifi SoC, 32 bit processor and on chip SRAM. It can be used for wifi networking need. It can be used as standalone application or as slave to host MCU.
ESP8266EX integrates antenna switches, power amplifier, RF balun, LNA, filters and power management units. ESP8266 supports IEEE 802.11 b/g/n.
It can be used for various applications such as home appliances, home automation, smart plugs, IP cameras, sensor networks, wearable electronics, security ID tags, wifi location aware devices etc. The figure depicts ESP8266 pin layout for its 32-pin QFN package.
Following are the features of ESP8266 board as depicted in ESP8266 block diagram:
• CPU : Tensilica L106 32 bit RISC processor, with max. clock speed of 160 MHz.
It includes interfaces such as iBus (for programmable RAM/ROM interface), dBus (Data RAM interface)
and AHB.
• Memory: SoC integrates memory controller and memory units (such as SRAM and ROM).
There is no programmable ROM and hence user program is stored in external SPI flash memory.
• Clock : It is used to drive both Tx and Rx mixers. Clock is generated using internal or external crystal which
ranges from 24 MHz to 52 MHz.
• Radio : It operates at 2.4 GHz frequency.
• WiFi : It supports TCP/IP and full wlan mac protocol as per IEEE 802.11 b/g/n. Supports STBC 2x1.
• Power Management : Active mode, modem sleep mode, light sleep mode, deep sleep mode etc. are supported by EPS8266 device.
• BLE : It does not support Bluetooth unlike ESP32 as described below.
• Interfaces : 17 GPIOs, one slave SDIO (Secure Digital Input/Output), 2 SPIs (One general Slave/Master SPI,
One general Slave HSPI), one I2C interface, one I2S, four PWM output interfaces and two UART interfaces are supported.
• One IR remote control interface is supported.
• ADC : 10 bit precision SAR ADC type is embedded on SoC.
What is ESP32 board ?
ESP32 is used for wifi and bluetooth based IoT applications. It houses antenna switch, power amplifier, LNA, filters, balun and power management modules. It supports wifi as per IEEE 802.11 b/g/n and bluetooth as per bluetooth V4.2 BR/EDR and BLE specifications.
Following are the features of ESP32 board :
• CPU : Xtensa® single/dual core 32 bit LX6 microprocessor
• Memory: 448 KB ROM, 520 KB SRAM
• Clocks : Internal 8 MHz oscillator, Internal RC oscillator, External 2 MHz to 60 MHz crystal oscillator etc.
• Timers : Two timer groups, One RTC timer and RTC watchdog.
• Peripheral interfaces: 34 GPIOs, 4 SPIs, 2 I2S, 2 I2C, 3 UART,
CAN 2.0, 1 host (SD/eMMC/SDIO), 1 slave (SDIO/SPI).
• ADC : 12 bit SAR ADC upto 18 channels.
• DAC : 2 x 8 bit DAC
• Sensors : 10 x touch sensors , Hall sensor
• Infrared: IR (Tx/Rx)
• PWM: motor PWM, LED PWM upto 16 channels
• Security : 1024-bit OTP upto 768 bit for customers
The figure depicts top view of ESP32 Pin Layout for QFN 6x6 package.
Difference between ESP32 and ESP8266 board
Following table summarizes similarities and difference between ESP32 and ESP8266 boards.
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