ESP8266 Community Forum

- Wed Sep 28, 2016 2:28 pm #55833 Most of Rui's tutorials are well crafted but they usually skip the trickiest part - flashing the firmware. Once you get that right you're home free. esptool.py is for flashing, ESPlorer et.al. for uploading Lua code.

As per http://nodemcu.readthedocs.io/en/latest ... ng-started: build the firmware, flash it, then upload Lua code.

Good luck and welcome to the NodeMCU universe.

https://frightanic.com/
https://nodemcu-build.com/
https://github.com/marcelstoer/nodemcu-pyflasher

- Wed Sep 28, 2016 2:30 pm #55834

There's a link to the docs just in case in one of my previous comments. Use esptool.py and study http://nodemcu.readthedocs.io/en/latest ... g-firmware.

Thanks I had avoided using esptool at the start mainly because one of the projects I found on line by Rui Santos pointed to ESPlorer. That definitely made it easier to get started, even though ESPlorer is not totally operational. So in my haste to get something going I went that route. I realize there is much to learn on many platforms just on this little module for the many uses out there, (c+,python,lua,html,css,toolchains, etc, etc). I'm old enough to be of the era that one could put a logic probe on a pin and find an issue, so I have much catching up to do. Hopefully I won't get too frustrated to continue.
Checking your link, I was reading that page when your post came in. I am confused about that as well. I was under the impression that using the NodeMCU flasher would be ok? I used that since I'm not familiar with esptool or how to flash the firmware with it.
Thanks again.[/quote][/quote]

- Wed Sep 28, 2016 3:13 pm #55836 So Is the NodeMCU flasher then no longer a valid way to flash?

- Thu Sep 29, 2016 10:37 am #55869 While waiting for an answer to whether or not the NodeMCU flasher could be used to flash the current generation of firmware, I decided to give it a try. I followed the procedure in the docs as I understood them, setting the offset to 0X00000 for the bin. Noting the caution about upgrading from 0.9.X I followed these instructions

Note:
The address for esp_init_data_default.bin depends on the size of your module's flash. ESP-01, -03, -07 etc. with 512 kByte flash require 0x7c000. Init data goes to 0x3fc000 on an ESP-12E with 4 MByte flash.

[url]From <https://nodemcu.readthedocs.io/en/master/en/flash/#upgrading-from-sdk-09x-firmware>[/url]

And placed the required file in the second line of the flasher with the offset 0x3fc000.
The result was not good. Upon rebooting in "run" mode (not flash) I again got a continuous stream of data from the serial port. This time I changed baud rates in ESPlorer to the module's native 74880. Below is the output sent over and over.

ets Jan 8 2013,rst cause:2, boot mode:(3,7)

load 0x40100000, len 25644, room 16
tail 12
chksum 0x6d
ho 0 tail 12 room 4
load 0x3ffe8000, len 2256, room 12
tail 4
chksum 0x06
load 0x3ffe88d0, len 8, room 4
tail 4
chksum 0x52
csum 0x52
rf_cal[0] !=0x05,is 0x00

I suppose I should know what all this means but that's in fact what I'm trying to learn . At this point I put the module back into flash configuration and uploaded the old 0.9.6 firmware. After several self-induced restarts it came up fine reporting

NodeMCU 0.9.6 build 20150704 powered by Lua 5.1.4
lua: cannot open init.lua