ESP8266 is great (with ideas for improvement)

[markxr]

Hi,

Micropython on the esp8266 is great. I am particularly pleased how easily it works getting from a bare board to the REPL, it's really easy (I followed the compilation instructions on Linux).

I'm also very pleased with how amazingly fast the developers fixed the bugs that I've reported - they have literally got fixed within hours, and I was able to pull the changes, rebuild and it works.

There are currently a few minor niggles that I'm trying to work out:

* the wifi AP scan() seems to crash in some (rare) circumstances, I can't reproduce it reliably as it appears to depend on the proximity of specific accesspoints.

* Sometimes machine.reset() does not reset the machine successfully. This is difficult to reproduce with a minimal example.

Of course as soon as I can reproduce these bugs, I will raise them.

---

A bigger concern to me, is how newbies are going to get files on to the esp8266 board. As it doesn't have a removable device like the micro-SD card (on the pyboard), it's not easy.

I had to reverse-engineer the firmware to discover where and how the fat filesystem exists, and do a fair bit of hacking to work out how to flash this (hint: it's at offset 561152 and needs a dos fs with 4k sector size). I've made a toolchain which does it easily (and quickly, only a few seconds to flash) - but I doubt others will be able to do this easily, even if I document it (which I plan to)

While the repl is great, getting files into the board is an obvious next step. We don't have a convenient file transfer program (maybe the webrepl supports file transfer? I've not really tried it much). It's also useful to be able to transfer files through the uart interface instead of wifi, because then I don't need to ensure they're connected to the same wifi network and know its ip address.

Keep up good work,

Mark

[deshipu]

The webrepl indeed supports file transfer. There is a "webrepl_cli.py" file in the webrepl repo that can be used to send files to your esp8266.

I hope that at some point that will get integrated into the actual *web*repl, and you will have a file dialog on the webrepl webpage.

[ideal2545]

I'm very much a newbie to micro-controllers in general and even to python.

I've got mpfshell working decently well with fuse mounting for transferring files. It's a little buggy but it works.

I wish we had some more clear instructions on installing libraries from micropython-lib for the esp8266.

Also when I do get them loaded I run out of memory, been trying to figure out how to send an email for a week using just socket, but no luck yet since I can't get base64 loaded for authentication.

[wendlers]

Hi,

It's also useful to be able to transfer files through the uart interface instead of wifi, because then I don't need to ensure they're connected to the same wifi network and know its ip address.

I ran into the same problem regarding file transfer. The only solution I found was writing a little helper tool (mpfshell) which offers me file-transfer from/to the ESP vial UART. If this is of interest to you, it could be found here: https://github.com/wendlers/mpfshell

Regards,
Stefan

[DWiskow]

ESPlorer (http://esp8266.ru/esplorer/ solves this problem perfectly across multiple platforms (Windoze, Mac, Linux) and also provides for REPL access . . . wired rather than wireless though

[EasyRider]

Since ESP has only 1 full/bidirectional hardware UART (Second only supports Tx, Rx(Gpio8) is tied to external Flash) which severely limits direct UART interfacing.

Are there any plans to expand number of Uarts in Micropython through bit bang firmware implementation?

Regards
John

[profra]

@EasyRider Look at voting of backers ... https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/21 ... ts/1540979 ... I hope in "bbuart" as well as you

[EasyRider]

In the meantime this configurable software UART works in the Arduino environment.

https://github.com/Ariel-International/ ... areserial2

[jms]

I too was wondering about using the existing UART for controlling some other bit of kit and plan to write up my findings very soon.