ESP8266 Community Forum

- Mon Jan 30, 2017 6:39 am #61764 Get an ESP-07S. It has 4MB flash (unlike the stock ESP-07 which has 1M), but has the same footprint and pinout as the 12 and 07. It _only_ has an external antenna, not the ceramic one.

The ESP-07 (stock) with ceramic antenna needs a hardware mod (remove a resistor) to enable the external antenna. Most people don't realise this.

The ESP-07S is shielded, unlike the D1 mini pro (at least last I looked).

I'm not aware of any software which makes use of the extra 12MB of flash the 16MB chip provides - as it's a bit fiddly to get to. Things may have moved on here though.

On the other hand if you want a dev board with external antenna the d1 mini pro is probably a good bet.

esp8266 otb-iot software - https://github.com/piersfinlayson/otb-iot
esp8266 otb-iot documentation - https://otb-iot.readthedocs.io/
esp8266 related blog - http://www.packom.net/

- Mon Jan 30, 2017 11:27 am #61781

I'm not aware of any software which makes use of the extra 12MB of flash the 16MB chip provides - as it's a bit fiddly to get to. Things may have moved on here though.

There is some hacks that can be done to get access to SPIFFS using the 16MB, but the OTA become broken.
I didn't get time yet, but probably OTA can be fixed to by hacking its location that need to stay in the first 4MB to avoid eboot failure.

http://www.packom.org/esp8266/16mb/flas ... dling.html

- Mon Jan 30, 2017 12:34 pm #61785

I'm not aware of any software which makes use of the extra 12MB of flash the 16MB chip provides - as it's a bit fiddly to get to. Things may have moved on here though.

There is some hacks that can be done to get access to SPIFFS using the 16MB, but the OTA become broken.
I didn't get time yet, but probably OTA can be fixed to by hacking its location that need to stay in the first 4MB to avoid eboot failure.

http://www.packom.org/esp8266/16mb/flas ... dling.html

As I say in that blog post, I have rboot successfully booting from 16MB. Not reason why OTA couldn't also be made to work. It's all possible, but the SDK doesn't make it very easy in a way that makes me believe that there may be some 4MB specific handling within the ROM code itself. Certainly isn't ready for the casual user at present.

I want to do some ESP32 experimentations at some point to see if that's more 16MB native (I expect so).

esp8266 otb-iot software - https://github.com/piersfinlayson/otb-iot
esp8266 otb-iot documentation - https://otb-iot.readthedocs.io/
esp8266 related blog - http://www.packom.net/

- Mon Jan 30, 2017 1:03 pm #61788 I was talking in the ArduinoESP context, where OTA is managed according to _SPIFFS_start location.
During some tests, I moved the whole SPIFFS above the 4MB, so 12MB of SPIFFS size, the OTA is flashing the firmware, but when e-boot is called to recopy it under right location, which use ROM functions, I got "need boot 1.4+", and hangs forever until doing a erase_flash with esptool.py.
To work around that, we would need to keep OTA location at it usual location so that ROM functions would still work, we need to have Updater using the same location, but not relying on the _SPIFFS_start location.
I will give it a try when I will finally get some free time, "time is the missing ingredient" ...