A new piece of Arduino hardware is now available to purchase from the Adafruit online store in the form of the Adafruit AirLift Shield. A piece of kit that offers you an Arduino shield that allows you to use the ESP32 as a WiFi co-processor. If your favourite Arduino board doesn’t have integrated wireless connectivity the new AirLift Shield can rectify that. Handling all the heavy lifting of connecting to a WiFi network and transferring data from a site, even if it’s using the latest TLS/SSL encryption.
Adafruit explained a little more about the new piece of hardware and its features. “Having WiFi managed by a separate chip means your code is simpler, you don’t have to cache socket data, or compile in & debug an SSL library. Send basic but powerful socket-based commands over 8MHz SPI for high speed data transfer. You can use any 3V or 5V Arduino, any chip from the ATmega328 or up (although the ‘328 will not be able to do very complex tasks or buffer a lot of data). It also works great with CircuitPython, a SAMD51/Cortex M4 minimum required since we need a bunch of RAM. All you need is the SPI bus and 2 control pins plus a power supply that can provide up to 250mA during WiFi usage.”
The Adafruit AirLift Shield is now available to purchase priced at $15.95 and come supplied fully assembled and tested, pre-programmed with ESP32 SPI WiFi co-processor firmware that you can use in CircuitPython to use this into WiFi co-processor.
Source: Arduino AirLift Shield ESP32 WiFi co-processor arrives at Adafruit
