ESP8266: Ready to go Setup

I realy enjoy playing with ESP8266. It is extremly small microcomputer that can handle HTTP server!

The only problem is to setup the development environment. From my experience the easiest way is to use Raspberry Pi.

Hardware

You need two things

• the ESP8266 itself
• the USB adapter USB-to-TTY

Arduino IDE

You can get the IDE from the software center. Just install it.

Out of the box it only supports Arduino boards. ESP8266 is made by Espressive so you need to get some files to make it works.

boards

Go to settings and add this URL to the alternative boards:

Now go to board manager and search for ESP8266. Install the plugin.

SPIFF Uploader

Our microcontroller has 1MB of flash storage (SPIFF). To push files to it you need a plugin:

Download ESP8266LittleFS-2.6.0.zip

Donwload it and put in the ~/Arduino/tools/ (make "tools" directory if needed).

Permissions

Last thing is to add permission for connecting to the board itself:

sudo gpasswd --add  dialout

Change for your username. It's not 'pi' anymore.

Short pins

Each time you want to push new code to the board you need to ground GPIO0 (first and third pins). To make the life easier I just soldered the simple button to back of the board. Pins on the button fits perfectly the exact needed pins on the ESP8266. Coincidance?

Now I just keep the button pushed while I replug the board.

Code examples

Plant Best Friend - ESP8266 Monitoring (HTTP Server)

Gemini Server Setup

Back to index