First Time ESP8266

22 Apr 2016

OK, here’s an actual weekend thing to do

Play with something well-understood, with lots of internet tutorials and free-opensource code for fun.

This tutorial from whomever CNX Software, among all the others on the internet, was particularly helpful to me.

I bought the LoLin NodeMCU v3, which may not be legitimate. Too big for a breadboard. Works, but others could be just as cheap.

Things to remember about it

I used the ESP8266 web service to get a firmware image and loaded it with esptool, not much trouble. The architecture with the real microcode separated from customization stuff in a lua file might really grow on me.

The main thing is that the lua on the ESP8266 needs to be kicked off with a “dofile(“main.lua”)” from serial, dunno why. Do all the setups do this?

Turn off the other serial connection when using some pyserial to load.

Other stuff

putty still acts like a windows program and doesn’t work so well with the console.

I’m a little worried that my router password is stored on my machine in a file now. Please don’t hack me.

I need to think of a real project for it.