Creamers wrote:@joek,
Could you provide some links to get me (and other n00bs) started in the right direction referring to the tools or maybe post a howto to get some people started the same way with the same result ?
well... this is indeed a bit of a problem to gather all this information which is quite scattered - and it get's outdated fast: I just learned that there is again a new version out.
For a basic intro this page provides some useful help:
http://www.electrodragon.com/w/Wi07cBTW: all recent FW versions seem to initialize again at 115 kBaud (which exceeds SoftSerial of Arduino). So you need a basic communication tool for your PC's serial port. (I have not tried to omit flashing the blank-binary, but it seems that by doing so, one clears all previous settings).
So here are the complete SDKs which contain the binaries, the command description and also a little info on what to flash where:
https://github.com/esp8266/esp8266-wiki/tree/master/sdkThe best flash tool seems to be this all-Chinese program:
http://www.electrodragon.com/w/File:ESP8266_flasher.png It may seem weird at first, but it does its job. Maybe less obvious: there are tabs to select and you need to click on the second one to specify the individual binary pieces and their starting address within the ESP. After a while you'll get the idea...
In order to run the flash tool, I'd strongly suggest to build a little breadboard carrier board with a USB/RS232-converter device to 3.3V Volt level and two buttons for RESET and GPIO0. (there are some suggestions to run the ESP with 5V signals which may work in the beginning, but eventually will fry the chip - so don't!)
Hope this helps a bit!? Still, you'd probably need to ask Google...
JoeK