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Talking to the esp8266 from a mac?

PostPosted: Sat Nov 08, 2014 2:43 pm
by Mikem42
I got the esp8266 and a 3.3v ftdi USB to serial cable and other bits from sparkfun in the mail today.

Hooked up 3.3v voltage regulator with an led to the 5v off the ftdi cable and checked that with a meter carefully. Then hooked up the esp8266 to serial and power.

So far the best command in the Mac shell I've found is:

`screen /dev/cu.usbserial-AJ02ZE2K 9600`

The slower 9600 is apparently common for later devices.

I also had to tie the non-gpio pins to 3.3v (reset and ch_pd). Now it prints a basic message when reset and also echos characters, but I'm pretty sure that it isn't understanding newline as gnu-screen is sending it, as it doesn't do anything besides return the cursor to the start of the line when I hit return.

[Vendor:www.ai-thinker.com Version:0.9.2.4]

ready

The little blue light flashes when I type, so I'm pretty sure the serial link is working other than "return". A good start, but I seem to be stuck on this issue currently. I can't seem to find anything that allows me to adjust what screen is sending for newline/carrage return. I'm guessing that because it's a Mac and it has a different idea about what should be sent for return versus an expected crlf set?

Re: Talking to the esp8266 from a mac?

PostPosted: Sun Nov 09, 2014 12:28 am
by Mikem42
The problem with gnu-screen under mac osx is that the crlf isn't getting sent correctly to the serial port. So, I used the Linux Virtualbox image that I had installed for the espressif compiler. I mapped the USB FTDI device to the linux box and then after a couple of tries and apt-get commands found this:

sudo picocom -b 9600 /dev/serial/by-id/usb-FTDI_FT232R_USB_UART_AJ02ZE2K-if00-port0 --omap crcrlf

And that worked like a charm. With a bit of fiddling around I found the correct sequence to attach to my wireless router:

AT+CWMODE=1
AT+CWLAP # to confirm that my router is visible
AT+CWJAP="ssid","auth-string"

And then I checked my router's DHCP table, and sure enough, there was a device there starting with espressif's assigned MAC addr from IEEE: 18:fe:34. http://standards.ieee.org/develop/regau ... ublic.html

Hostname IP Address MAC Address Expires
* 192.168.1.76 18:fe:34:9f:1d:6a 23:17:12

After switching from my guest network to my internal network, I was able to ping the device from another machine on the internal network:

big-imac:$ ping 192.168.1.76
PING 192.168.1.76 (192.168.1.76): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 192.168.1.76: icmp_seq=0 ttl=255 time=322.462 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.76: icmp_seq=1 ttl=255 time=234.059 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.76: icmp_seq=2 ttl=255 time=164.812 ms
^C
--- 192.168.1.76 ping statistics ---
3 packets transmitted, 3 packets received, 0.0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 164.812/240.444/322.462/64.519 ms
big-imac:$

So that's really cool. I'd appreciate any suggestions on serial com programs to use under macos that allow control over how crlf is managed. I probably won't use it much at this point because my next step is to start compiling code and uploading it, but it would be handy for confirming basic functionality on new modules...

Re: Talking to the esp8266 from a mac?

PostPosted: Sun Nov 09, 2014 2:50 am
by bjpirt
I've found that CoolTerm works for me:

http://freeware.the-meiers.org/

Re: Talking to the esp8266 from a mac?

PostPosted: Sun Nov 09, 2014 7:30 am
by joe
Why are those ping times so long?