Welcome to the ESP8266 project page.
Here you will have access to quality. Tested information about programming and setting up your ESP8266 to do real tasks.
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What is an ESP8266?
Well its a computer. A programmable micro controller with built in wifi. The wifi bit is what makes it friggin awesome.
There are nearly endless uses for an ESP8266. For this article I will focus on the most commonly available module. The ESP-01 is a serial wifi module being sold for the arduinos that can be purchased for a piddly $3.50. Thats right. These things can be had for only $3.50 or less off of ebay.
It turns out that with a couple of wires the modules firmware can be flashed and it can go from beig a dumb wifi adapter for the likes of arduino to being a full blown micro controller with wifi capability.
Flashing the firmware
Flashing the firmware is a fairly straight forward process. All it requires is that you have an arduino board, a few jumpers and some time to get every thing wired up.
The nice thing about the arduino board besides it acting as the USB to serial adapter is the face that it has a 3.3 volt power pin. The ESP8266 chip can only use a 3.3v power supply.
Here is a picture of how I hooked it all up. Notice the ground wire hooked to the GPIO0 pin. This is only required when we are flashing the LUA interpreter on to the chip. Once were are done flashing this must be removed.
The CH_PD pin must be pulled high and must be connected to power at all times. Even when not in flashing mode.
The next step is to download the software. For my convenience and yours I have mad a package that contains all of the needed files. It can be download from here.
Once you have unziped the file you should have a folder called "ESP8266".
At this point plug your arduino board in to the computer.
Browse to the folder labeled "Flasher" and run "ESP8266Flasher-64.exe" or "ESP8266Flasher-32.exe" depending on if you have a 32 or 64 bit system.
A window like shown below should appear. Click on the configure tab.
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| Fig 2 |
Click the small gear icon on the first line to select the firmware image.
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| Fig 3 |
Select the "nodemcu_float_0.9.6-dev_20150704.bin" from inside the "flasher" folder.
Next go back to the "Operation tab. Make sure the right com port is selected and hit the flash button.
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| Fig 4 |
You can close the flasher a this time.
Programming the device with LUA
To start the LUA programming environment run the "ESPlorer.bat" in the "ESPlorer".
A window like shown below should appear.
Descriptions of the different functions available.
