ESP8266 Community Forum

- Thu Feb 04, 2016 5:43 am #40398 Hello everybody,
my name is Vlatko, and I am a co-founder of a educational robotics startup STEMI.

I am considering the idea that the robot in question is controlled over WiFi with ESP8266.

I have succeeded in doing so on a NodeMCU development board ( ESP-12E) using lua scripts, and I am very pleased with it.

But I still have an issue that I have yet to resolve:I need to be able to flash around 150 ESPs with NodeMCU firmware + my custom lua scripts and html/css/js files.

Is there a way to build NodeMCU firmware containing my custom files on the filesystem into one binary blob that I could just pass to the factory and get 150 ESP8266s preprogrammed?

Or it is maybe possible to "rip" the current flash memory of my prototype ESP8266 and obtain a binary blob that way?

Thanks for reading this,
I really hope this is possible somehow so i do not have to rewrite all these scripts in C.

-Vlatko

- Thu Feb 04, 2016 10:21 am #40421 The esptool.py has the "read_flash" option, so you can backup your current firmware+data and reflash other ESPs.

- Mon Jun 20, 2016 11:15 am #49487

The esptool.py has the "read_flash" option, so you can backup your current firmware+data and reflash other ESPs.

Hello, really appriciate the response, I have been able to flash FW properly but I am realy struggling with reading all the files from the flash. Does anybody have the idea what is the layout of the SPIFFS, eg. which addresses are responsible for hosting the firmware, and which are responsible for hosting the files?

- Mon Jun 20, 2016 11:33 am #49488 You should look at the LD script used for your Flash size to figure out the SPIFFS start address.
In ArduinoESP framework, lets say for eagle.flash.4m1m.ld, the value is _SPIFFS_start = 0x40500000, so since the Flash start is 0x40000000, using esptool.py the address would be 0x00500000.