From debug messages to the fundamental ‘hello world’, serial communication does it all over three little wires. now imagine being able to cut the cord to your next microcontroller project and use your phone as a VT100 terminal. This was the premise of [Ondřej Hruška]’s Wireless terminal Project where he took an ESP8266 and added an in-browser terminal emulator which can be accessed over WiFi. The final hardware uses an ESP-01 module mounted atop a breadboard adapter with a 3.3V LDO, protection circuitry for the pins and under-voltage disable.
The firmware is based on [SpriteTM]’s libesphttpd code which was modified to include the VT100 escape sequence parser. The parser, in turn, was coded as a state maker and compiled using Ragel which simplifies such projects greatly. When you access the tiny web server, the loaded web page starts to communicate over web sockets to the ESP-01. Key-presses from the terminal are sent to the buffer and onto the parser and control logic. The characters are then passed to the hardware UART lines at 115200bps and if an escape sequence is detected, the corresponding action is carried out instead.
[Ondřej Hruška] shares the code as well as a user manual in PDF for any individual who would like to try it out and help improve the project. With a little inspiration on learning about state machines, you could extend the project to your own use case as well.
Thanks for the idea [Marco Saarloos]