My New Toy (Part 1)

Today my new toy arrived.  It’s an ESP8266 IOT WiFi Module.

Specifically I selected the “Elecrow ESP8266 IOT Board WiFi Module with Built in USB and Battery Charging” out of the many ESP8266 variants because of the following features:

• Onboard USB (I find it easier than FTDI)
• NOT breadboard friendly (Pins sticking up not down)
• In stock and eligible for Prime shipping

To start with, I just wanted to verify that I could run some code on it.  Here’s what I did:

1. Installed the Arduino IDE from https://www.arduino.cc/en/Main/Software.  I used the latest available (1.6.9).
2. Configured the Arduino IDE to support ESP8266 boards:
   1. Opened up the preferences and added http://arduino.esp8266.com/versions/2.3.0/package_esp8266com_index.json to the “Additional Boards Manager URLs”.
   2. Opened the “Boards Manager”, found the “esp8266” listing, and clicked the “Install” button (using the latest 2.3.0 version).
   3. Since there wasn’t a specific Electrow entry, I selected “Generic ESP8266 Module” for the board type.
3. Wrote some code.  Here is my very simple sketch to slowly count and send the number via serial:

   int count = 0;
    void setup() {
    Serial.begin(9600);
    }
    void loop() {
    Serial.println(count++);
    delay(1000);
    }

4. Ran the code.  I uploaded it to the module, opened the serial terminal, and saw that it was counting as designed.
   

Of course it took a bit of kicking and swearing to do that.  Here are a few of the things that I did before everything worked:

1. Ran the Arduino IDE as root
2. The upload speed is 115200, but the terminal speed is 9600 baud
3. Change the reset method to “nodemcu”.
4. Sometimes (but not always) hold the flash button and than hit the reset button before I could successfully upload my sketch.
5. Switch USB cords (the first is a cheap, old cord that in recent years has only been used for charging devices).
6. Check the port whenever I plugged in the module (it sometimes switched between /dev/ttyUSB0 and /dev/ttyUSB1 just to spite me).

There’s nothing exciting about my counting program, but by getting it running I confirmed that I can 1) Connect to the module 2) Upload code to it and 3) Run the code.  Now that I can do that, I can see what else I can make my new toy do . . .

Author: Nathan

I like to do stuff. View all posts by Nathan