What do you mean?
> the amount of lead is harmless for DIY solderers.
To date, the FDA, CDC, and the WHO state that "no amount of lead is harmless". It's just that we can't get a sensitive enough handle on the neurological effects to determine a good metric for it.
On another note, does anyone know if the Respro masks are suitable for protection against lead (+ the stuff with lead) inhalation while soldering? The "techno" mask has a HEP-A filter and a charcoal mesh, which I would have thought would be enough for most of the lead particulate?
You have to breath it or ingest it for it be dangerous. In soldering it does not get anywhere near hot enough to vaporize, so really all you have to worry about is ingestion.
As long as you either don't touch the solder, or are careful after touching it to not touch anything that may find its way into you until you can thoroughly wash whatever parts of you touched the lead (or were touched by parts of you that touched the lead), you should be OK.
The biggest health risk during soldering is going to come from the flux. It's the flux burning that produces the smoke you see and smell during soldering.
Here's a document from LBNL on safe soldering practices that goes into the components of solder (leaded and lead-free) and their dangers: http://www2.lbl.gov/ehs/ih/pdf/safeSolderingFinal.pdf
Although that degree of caution is more or less warranted when dealing with lead solder in paste form, I have to admit. That crap gets everywhere.
Exactly.
Fumbling around with a soldering iron and some leaded solder a little bit, few times a decade, won't give you cancer or any poisoning. Safety considerations are aimed at people doing lots of soldering, because at this point the amount of flux fumes they might breathe in (or risk of ingesting lead) becomes a possible risk.
(And to be honest, I believe most of this safety advice is aimed not at DIY people, and not even at people who occasionally have to solder something at work, but to have a stick that will prevent employers in soldering shops from creating very unhealthy conditions for their workers.)
I would say that the Arduino advantage is that it's truly out of the box. ESP8266 is close, but it's not that easy.
If you want an easy IoT dev board, I will always recommend the Particle Photon (no affiliation). It's $20 and has really great documentation. It will do OTA updates out of the box once you've set it up on your network using a smartphone. It's a separate IDE (cloud based, or you can get an offline one), but you still use Wiring and they've retained the setup() / loop() constructs. I have had some issues with devices not connecting to networks using the chip antenna, so you probably need the external one.
Other minor issues - most ESP boards are not FCC/CE compliant. They're just fake stamps on the EM shield. Some of the boards are, but you need to be careful if you're trying to build a product or worry about interference. The Photon, on the other hand, is certified (and they also certified it with a suitable external antenna).
It used to be the case that people were unsure if the logic pins were 5V tolerant or not due to ambiguity in the datasheet and the consensus was to be cautious, but it has since been officially confirmed that they are tolerant. Some other devices (e.g. relays, some MOSFET gates) might require a 5V output level to trigger, in which case you will need a level shifter/transistor, but 5V inputs to the pins are fine (and most digital devices that work at 5V logic levels will be fine with 3.3V logical high due to the way TTL levels are defined).
See discussion here: https://hackaday.com/2016/07/28/ask-hackaday-is-the-esp8266-... and official reply on Facebook (of all places): https://www.facebook.com/groups/1499045113679103/permalink/1...
> Teo Swee Ann i can reply officially here: it is 5V tolerant at the IO. while the supply voltage is at 3.3V.
Yes there are loads of other breakout boards that suck but I found Wemos ones to be great.
Adafruit Huzzah https://www.adafruit.com/product/2471
NodeMCU is good, there's a ton on ebay.
https://www.aliexpress.com/store/group/WeMos/1331105_2571030...
https://m.aliexpress.com/s/item/32765214054.html?spm=a2g0n.s...
https://m.aliexpress.com/s/item/32454217006.html?spm=a2g0n.s...
The soldering iron is the only thing I got state-side. I went with one that has temperature control so I can do lead-free solder.
If you are into home automation, look into Sonoff stuff. It uses these chips but comes nicely packaged into several different form factors. You can run open source firmware on them.
Plain Arduino (AVR) boards don’t have a ton of advantage over the ESP8266 and ESP32 chips. So I’d honestly mostly skip them except if you want a ton of GPIO pins or if you want to use the Uno form factor with the shields. Having Wi-Fi is such a huge thing that I think it outweighs the other considerations. Good luck!