ESP8266 Community Forum

- Mon Sep 28, 2020 3:22 pm #88939 The breakout boards are rather large which seems to defeat the object.

When I was looking I found a site where you can buy pcb's designed by others:
https://www.pcbway.com/project/sharepro ... board.html
https://www.pcbway.com/project/sharepro ... Board.html
https://www.pcbway.com/project/sharepro ... apter.html

I ended up soldering solid wire onto the board and bending it to fit the 2.54 pitch. Just be careful not to short anything.

- Tue Sep 29, 2020 6:27 am #88944 I serial flash each ESP-12F on a pogo pin adapter just once before deployment and then use OTA for any future updates after deployment.

OTA is actually very simple to add and to use and has the advantage that you can update devices in situ. If you have several devices using same code then you can produce a new binary once and then OTA it to all the devices.

I would recommend testing any new code in your development environment to make sure that any change hasn't compromised network connectivity or OTA ability as otherwise OTA becomes a one way trip and you have to resort to a serial flash.

- Tue Sep 29, 2020 6:40 am #88945 Since size generally is not really a concern to me, I have a bunch of these simple adapter boards

Assumption is the mother of all f*ckups. At least: that's what I'm assuming.

- Tue Sep 29, 2020 10:13 am #88947 Indeed OTA is mostly the solution, but every OTA can fail (no matter how much precautions are taken), so you must be prepared to take the ESP out for re-flashing.

Another approach might be an ICSP connector, like ATMel and Microchip have. They offer a sort of special SPI bus for programming. For the ESP that would be Vcc, GND, GPIO 0, U0TxD, U0RxD and RESET. GPIO 2 and GPIO 15 would be optional depending on what's default in your circuit.