Tag Archives: Duty Cycle

ESP8266 NodeMCU Backdoor uPWM Hack for IR signals

We received our ESP8266 NodeMCU several months ago it has been difficult to find a working example of Hardware PWM to generate crisp Infrared carrier signals. Most posts we have read suggest that there is no PWM readily available on any of the supported platforms. As we have already shown with Arduinos and the Particle Photon we figured it would be possible to use a spare UART pin on the ESP8266 NodeMCU to achieve our goal.  After some initial success we encountered some watchdog timeouts/resets and it seemed like the uPWM hack would not be possible on the ESP8266 Node MCU platform. For a few weeks we ‘parked’  the effort and today we decided to try again with all of the latest and updated firmware available from the ESP8266 community via the Arduino IDE. This time we were successful and the ESP8266 NodeMCU Backdoor uPWM Hack for IR signals using works!

ESP8266 NodeMCU uPWM Inverted IR Circuit
ESP8266 NodeMCU uPWM Inverted IR Circuit

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Backdoor uPWM Hack on Photon for Infrared signals using UART

Since we received our Photon several months ago it has been difficult to find a working example of Hardware PWM on the Photon. Initially, we ported our softPWM approach to the Photon, which is excellent. However, we figured it must be possible to use at least one of the spare UARTs on the Photon to achieve our goal. So first we started prototyping on the Arduino and quickly got a working example with some limitations – only 40 kHz and 33 kHz carrier frequencies were possible with the UART without delving into the registers a bit more. Then we moved the code over to the Photon, leveraging our previous softPWM examples, upgraded with the Arduino code – EUREKA! The Backdoor uPWM Hack on Photon for Infrared signals.

uPWM Circuit diagram for Photon
uPWM Circuit diagram for Photon using UART

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