ACROBOTIC Industries

What is the ESP8266?

The ESP8266 Serial to Wi-Fi SoC, released in the summer of 2014, has become a center point in the development of inexpensive IoT applications.  Given that Wi-Fi chips have been available for around a decade, you may be wondering what makes the ESP8266 special.  Besides being released at the 'right' time, meaning as Internet Of Things (IoT) have entered everyday speak among developers and tech entrepreneurs, there are a few reasons behind its meteoric rise in popularity:

• Very capable microcontroller (32-bit 80MHz, built-in Wi-Fi, adequate I/O buses and peripherals; full specs below)
• Extremely low-cost; ~$1 in moderate volumes)
• Open SDK that works with GCC
• Demonstrated ability to run Lua (NodeMCU), JavaScript (Espruino), and Python (MicroPython) interpreters!
• Arduino IDE integration

Because the ESP8266 was only released in a tiny-sized, tough-to-solder, QFN package, a market was opened for inexpensive breakout and adapter boards that facilitated working with the chip.  The most popular were a series of modules branded ESP-NN – where NN is a 2 digit number sometimes followed by a letter. 

Step-by-step Video

We've made a video following the process described in this tutorial, if that's your preferred media for tutorials go right ahead:

Download Espruino Image

Navigate to the download section of the Espruino project website, and download the latest version of the Espruino firmware.  At the time of this writing, the latest release is version 1.85.

Once downloaded, go ahead and move the zipped file to a known location on your computer.  For this tutorial, we'll create a folder inside our user's directory called ESP8266-Espruino. From your Terminal App type in:

cd ~ && mkdir ESP8266-Espruino

We then move and unzip the file inside said directory.

Installing pySerial

pySerial is a Python module that allows a Python program to communicate with a serial (e.g., USB, RS232) port.  The tool that we'll use to load the Espruino firmware onto the ESP8266 Development Board is written in Python, and it uses this module to communicate with the USB port for writing out the firmware to (specific) devices connected to it.

Arguably, the simplest way to install this is by downloading the source code from the project's Github repository:

• https://github.com/pyserial/pyserial

cd ESP8266-Espruino && git clone https://github.com/pyserial/pyserial

Then, we can install the pySerial module in our system.  For this tutorial, we'll make it available for our entire system (system-wide install), but you could also do this inside a Python virtual environment.

cd pyserial && sudo python setup.py install

Downloading Software For Loading Espruino Onto The Board

The last piece of software we need is the program that will allow us to write the Espruino firmware onto the ESP8266 Development Board over USB (using amongst other things the pySerial module).  To get this tool we can simply: 

cd .. && git clone https://github.com/themadinventor/esptool

Because Espruino runs in a variety of boards, we need to find the directory with the files corresponding to the ESP8266.  This is located inside our espruino_1v85 folder.  We can then start writing the Espruino firmware with ease!

cd espruino_1v85/espruino_1v85_esp8266

python ../../esptool/esptool.py --port /dev/tty.SLAB_USBtoUART --baud 115200 \
write_flash --flash_freq 80m --flash_mode qio --flash_size 32m \
0x0000 "boot_v1.4(b1).bin" 0x1000 espruino_esp8266_user1.bin \
0x3FC000 esp_init_data_default.bin 0x3FE000 blank.bin

If everything goes well, you should get something similar to what's shown on this screenshot (no errors):

Sending JavaScript Over USB

Now we can use any Serial Terminal programs to start sending JavaScript commands over USB to the ESP8266, and have the Espruino firmware interpret them accordingly.  In our case, we'll use the program screen available in OSX, so from our terminal we enter:

screen /dev/tty.SLAB_USBtoUART 115200

And we should establish a connection to the USB port at a baud rate of 115200 (press Ctrl-A followed by Ctrl-\ to quit).  The screen should go blank at this point, so the easiest test is to reset your ESP8266 Development Board, which outputs the startup message shown below once the Espruino firmware starts running:

Finally, we can use the Espruino API to test out a few commands.  Connect an LED to the pin labeled D2 on the board, which corresponds to GPIO4 on the ESP8266 SoC.  If we input the command:

digitalWrite(D4,1)

The LED should turn on!  Remember that the Espruino firmware uses the GPIO numbers instead of the board labels to refer to each pin.  Make sure you have our trusty pinout diagram handy:

Finally, we can combine traditional JavaScript with the Espruino API to write a Blink program:

var status = 1; setInterval(function(){status = !status; digitalWrite(D4,status)},1000)