MicroPython Forum (Archive)

Since the ESP-01 is not breadboard friendly, I decided to build a little jig to program them. It uses a Sparkfun USB-C serial interface and has a socket for a generic 128x64 OLED display as well. Now that the PicoW is available I probably won't be buying any more ESP-01 versions of the esp8266 but life is too short to have to kludge together a way to erase and program them. There is also a 2x2 male header for a reset jumper for getting the ESP into flash mode.

Espressif uses the circuitzry below have esptool.py switching the device into bootloader mode. RST and GPIO0 are the pins at the ESP device, DTR and RTS are available at the USB/UART adapter. That makes uploading very easy. If you build your firmware yourself, just add the 'deploy' action to the make command. The transistor can be any small signal NPN transistor.

Thanks for the suggestion! I considered using the UART handshake lines to streamline the bootloader operation but stopped short of that when I had enough to make it work. Maybe later.