It’s been less than a year since the ESP8266 WiFi Module was released. This is a chip whose original data sheets were only available in Chinese, could only be controlled through AT commands, and was (originally) only sold through Seeed Studio and other various Chinese retailers. It had one thing going for it: it was five dollars. For the price of a crappy sub, you can blink an LED from the Internet. Needless to say, the ESP8266 is now very popular.

There are a lot of ESP8266 projects in The Hackaday Prize this year, and [David]’s project is making great use of the relatively meager pinout of this module. He’s built an 8-channel relay controller with a WiFi interface to control industrial equipment. It’s a great project, but just of many ESP projects in the prize this year.

The ESP doesn’t have a huge number of pins, but there are enough for some serious work with the right hardware. He’s using the ESP-12 module to get the most pins, and using an SPI port expander to drive an octet of relays. It’s a simple board, but everything you need to control a bunch of relays over WiFi is right there: LEDs, reset buttons, and RS232 level conversion.

You can check out a pair of very satisfying videos of relays clicking below.

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by: