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Wemos D1 mini

8owners with an opinion
83%of verdicts positive
0/0positive/negative since 2024
2 yrslongest happy owner
0happy after 3+ years

Praised for value and ease of use; criticized for battery and reliability.

What people wrote

Likes itOwned 2 yearsStill going
There are clones and clones and some other Chinese-designed boards like Wemos that work just fine. Maybe they're not $2 but you can get them for $5 a piece. I have an D1 mini biard with ESP8266 that has been running for at least 2 years with Tasmota and a bunch of sensors. If the Western companies stop doing open source hardware, some other companies in China will go on with their own designs.
Doesn’t like it
We used a few thousand of the D1 mini (ESP8266) for our air quality monitor kits and had a couple of issues. On some of them the WiFi would not work at all. Kind of like the onboard antenna was not properly connected. Other died after a few months without any special reason that we were aware of. Another problem with these boards is that you do not know exactly the specs of the other components. For example we got different rated voltage regulators (5v to 3.3) that caused some issues because sensors we put on the 3.3v did have higher requirements. Interestingly we had more issues with the "original" ones than the clones. I actually wrote a small blog post about it [1]. Another issue is that it is difficult to get proper ROHS and REACH certifications for these modules. This makes it difficult if you want to use them in a finished and certified product. All of these issues added up and we made the switch away from the module and now put the ESP32-C3-MINI directly onto the PCBs of our indoor and outdoor air quality monitors. Together with an external hardware watchdog, this seems to pretty much eliminate all issues we had. If you are interested in the shematics, its all open source [2]. [1] https://www.airgradient.com/blog/d1-mimi/ [2] https://www.airgradient.com/open-airgradient/instructions/ov...
Likes it
You are not wrong about WiFi. But sometimes worse is better. :-) With WiFi, I don't need any other technology stack, no hubs, no bridges. I can use my existing network infrastructure. The data packets from the ESP8266 devices get delivered directly to the MQTT broker over TCP/IP over WiFi. It's cheap (~$3 for a D1 Mini), dead simple, and good enough. Every 15 minutes seems about right for temperature/humidity sensors. Increasing it beyond 15-30 minutes becomes a diminishing return, because at that point, the Deep Sleep power usage becomes greater than active WiFi usage.
Likes it
It also could be if you're still using 8266 vs esp32 or if you're on Arduino vs esp-idf. Arduino esp32 is a wrapper on top of the idf so not sure what added things could be slowing the program? Static ip might be even faster! Also, I have it initialized station mode. I do recall the d1 mini having a really low quiescent current. Yea the converters can also take up power I separate that and place it on a jig.
Neutral
The ESP8266 has 5 sleep modes, as summarized by this README.md in the Arduino ESP8266 Core: https://github.com/esp8266/Arduino/tree/master/libraries/esp... The `delay(1)` triggers the "Automatic Modem Sleep" mode, which keeps the WiFi connection alive. It should draw about 15-16 mA, which is pretty close to the 18-24 mA measured in the TFA. The WiFi radio consumes a lot of power. During initialization, I believe it can consume 500 mA or more. In normal usage, WiFi apparently has a continuous drain of ~70 mA. If WiFi is not needed, the ESP8266 can be placed into "Forced Deep Sleep" mode, with an idle current of 0.02 mA. Using a ~2000 mAh battery (e.g. 3xAA NiMh, or 1x18650 Li-Ion), that means over 11 years on battery, if no other work is performed. The lowest current that I have measured personally is 0.04 mA on various ESP-01 modules. But that still means about 5.5 years on a single charge. If the WiFi is needed only intermittently, the ESP8266 can be placed into "Forced Deep Sleep" mode, with the internal RTC configured to wake it up after a certain time, e.g. 15-30 minutes. It can then connect to WiFi, transmit the data payload, then go back to Deep Sleep again. Unfortunately, the ESP-01 module does not support this (without hardware hacking), because it does not expose the GPIO16/D0 pin necessary to trigger the RESET. Other ESP8266 dev boards (e.g. D1 Mini, NodeMCU) do support waking up from Deep Sleep. But these dev boards often contain a voltage regulator which consu…
Likes it
If you're up for some light soldering, I'd recommend picking up a few Sonoff Basics and/or wall plugs and then flashing them with ESPHome ( https://esphome.io/ ). These devices are simple and cheap ($5-6 each), basically just an ESP8266 chip connected to a relay, a button, and a status LED. You have to solder to attach four pins to the board so you can flash it, then you can close it up forever. Future updates happen over-the-air. I am far from being an electrical engineer, and found that these guides, plus a few YouTube videos, got me to the point where this feels routine. I now have over a dozen in my house, controlling all manner of things. I've also had fun installing temperature and humidity sensors to Wemos D1 Minis ($2-$3, basically just an ESP8266 chip on a development board) to monitor climate around the house. During the winter, houseplants really like to have higher humidity... we bought a bunch of dumb humidifiers at goodwill, installed Sonos Basic relays inside them, and set rules for them to turn on when the humidity in the room drops too low.
Likes it
The D1 mini definitely is nice, I have a dozen of them running all over the house, controlling the lights, monitoring CO2, temp, humidity, power/gas/water usage the works. Do get the feeling that they might start congesting my router, but have a pi home server in the works to prevent that.
Likes itDoesn’t say they own it
> I'm not convinced "Arduino has kinda dropped the ball" While Arduino is strong in many regards and was a big improvement on the status quo when it came out in ~2005, they weren't very fast to respond to the rise of the esp8266 and super-low-cost boards made in China. For a long time their cheapest product was the Uno R3 (with a 16 MHz 8-bit ATmega328) for about $25 while you could buy a Wemos D1 mini (with a 160 MHz 32-bit esp8266) for $2 - or an Uno clone on aliexpress for $3. Arduino have updated their product line since then (the Uno R4 Minima offers a 48MHz 32-bit RA4M1 for $19) and it's understandable they wanted to retain compatibility with their 5v shield ecosystem. But they were definitely slow to respond to a changing market.