ESP8266 Community Forum

This keeps cropping up again and again because of outdated instructions, but you DONT need to be able to see esptool. If you are seeing generic board in the board list and the port for your serial device is listed then that is all you need to see for that. There are other issues which are probably blocking your upload.
I jumped through all the hoops looking for esptool to show up, but eventually found that it was not necessary. The the issue i had was with compile error, and this is due to a missing dll (libiconv-2.dll) after finding this correct dll from a google search of this error, i now have 1.6.3 working.

Hope this helps.

Hey there,

I just built the latest version of the IDE, following the build instructions for Mac OS X (I'm using 10.10.3) with ant (installed via homebrew). The build completes without errors, but then I'm having the same issues discussed in this thread:

- esptool doesn't show up (programmers.txt is empty, using an old programmers.txt makes it show up though)
- known working examples, like the HelloServer, compile and flash to the module without error, but then the module doesn't seem to respond as expected (server doesn't start up, only rubbish output from the bootloader in the console, not from the sketch)

Whereas when flashed with the prebuild IDE, the same example performs properly, server starts up, Serial response fine.

Kind regards

I try what u did, works fine. Same setup as yours.

esptool never shows up in the Programmer menu, it doesn't matter. As long as u in the Board menu, u select "Generic ESP8266 Module", u are all set.

When first boot up, the garbage characters are boot loader message output at 78400bps. Once the HelloServer starts, it set the baud rate to 115200bps. Just make sure u set the Serial Monitor to 115200bps.

@ulumu

You're right, the "garbage" is debug output from the bootloader and the esptool doesn't necessarily have to be in the dropdown menu to flash, and indeed, I can flash the example "HelloServer" to the module using my own build. But when it then runs the binary, it only outputs the "garbage" debug output from the bootloader, and after that there's no serial response anymore at all. Also, the webserver is not running then.

I also found that examples, that don't make use of the ESP8266 specific libraries, compile, flash and run fine using my own build of the IDE.

When using the precompiled IDE for mac, all described here works fine, even the HelloServer example and all the EPS8266 specific libraries work.

This is very strange and any help is very appreciated

I'm trying this because it would be nice to have the _sbrk_r and some other fixes in the IDE, replacing the \hardware\esp8266com\esp8266 with this one as described here didn't work for me either.