{"id":15056,"date":"2022-01-21T21:58:57","date_gmt":"2022-01-21T14:58:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.makeriot2020.com\/?p=15056"},"modified":"2022-01-21T21:59:01","modified_gmt":"2022-01-21T14:59:01","slug":"port-extender-card-for-the-mcu-8266-12e","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.makeriot2020.com\/index.php\/2022\/01\/21\/port-extender-card-for-the-mcu-8266-12e\/","title":{"rendered":"Port Extender Card for the MCU-8266-12E"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Port Extender Card for the MCU-8266-12E IoT Controller<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Introduction<\/strong>

After quite a few experiments, and playing with a lot of ideas<\/a>, we have finally produced and tested an almost final prototype for the MCU-8266-12E IoT Controller Port Extender Card. While the baseboard already has quite a lot of free GPIO pins for additional sensors and devices, It did however have quite a few issues, namely a lack of sufficient Power outputs, difficulty access to the I2C bus, as well as only 2 relay outputs. Granted that you do have access to unused pins on the PCF8574 Port Extender, We nonetheless decided that an add-on card would definitely make sense to allow this device to really be more useable.

While looking at various ideas for this card, the most flexible seemed to be the APE Protocol device<\/a> as documented in ESPHome. They used a standard Arduino board for that, but we decided that, after testing it with an Arduino Nano, since it seems to work well, let us just design a dedicated PCB. It also looks much better as well \ud83d\ude42 <\/p>\n\n\n\n