ESP8266 Wemos D1 Mini pinout

My Wemos D1 Mini WiFi boards had arrived from China1 on Friday and I’ve been fiending to build… something with them.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t get the very basic “blink” sketch to upload.  Here were my symptoms:

• When uploading, I got the “error: failed to open” message
• My Windows computer flashed a message when I connected the board, saying it was an unrecognized device
• The Device Manager showed a little “alert triangle” suggesting the proper drivers were not installed
• All of the ports in the Arduino IDE were disabled and greyed out

I tried several different upload speeds and several different USB micro cables to no success.  It was not until I found this post explaining that I needed to update the Wemos drivers along with a handy link to said drivers.

Now that I got this board blinking, I can’t wait to get it to do MOAR…

Update:  My buddy Chris pointed out that I’ve been mixing up ESP32 and ESP8266.  I’ve corrected the title now.

1. $13 for four boards plus headers?! [↩]