ESP8266 Development Board NodeMCU Lua V3 WiFi with CH340G USB and Base Shield

I have bought three of these now. I had to return the first one because the voltage regulator was faulty and it never powered on. Return was, of course, easy with Amazon.On my second order, I bought two of these. One worked flawlessly, the second wouldn't communicate. Turns out there was a solder blob between the Rx and D8 pin on the ESP8266 board. Once I removed the solder blob, it works just fine.I'm using these to replace my wired alarm system with the free Konnected.io system on GitHub and integrating it with SmartThings. So far everything is now working great!I'd easily give five stars if the solder quality was better. I figure most people who are buying these are tinkerers anyway so I can still very highly recommend them. I'll have a complete home alarm system for right around $100 all-in, with no monitoring costs!

The base is a good design to for home alarm and automation projects. The barrel connector accepts quite a range of power input and there are plenty of pins to connect sensors and devices.The quality of the product was iffy for me. I sent the first back when I discovered that some of the pins were not connected. There were obvious cold solder joints. The replacement pins were good, but now the power LED has stopped working. Not a major defect, but certainly annoying.

The board I received was defective and started to produce black smoke after 30 minutes of use. This then occurred almost immediately after plugging in then after. This is unacceptable in that my use case has this board being mounted in a enclosed in-wall space, a true danger if something were to happen once installed. NodeMCUs are still good boards though and are an effective way to finish diy products, I just recommended you find another supplier…

I used these devices to setup a Konnected home security system. They work very well, but the soldering is fairly poor. There is also quite a bit of flux left on the boards which make them a bit sticky. It doesn't impact performance but they should have been washed prior to sale.

This is review is NOT about the vendor but about the development board that I bought. I was not able to find the documentation. I had to use my DVM to figure out the pins. Why do you need 4 pins of each GPIO? The board would be a lot better with ground, power, and signal for each GPIO. Also, instead of a barrel power connector, they should have used a micro-USB connector.

What a fun little board! Works great with the Arduino IDE. WiFi connectivity is easy to use.Buy the board/carrier combo, and you know they fit together.(I run it from a 5v DC supply and just jumper over the regulator by connected VIN to 5V on the side.)

This board gets really really hot. I compared with another and it was cool to the touch. Either something is wrong with the particular board I got or it is true for this kind.

dirty boards, really bad solder joints! It works but not for long with this quality