This document will allow you to develop native C/C++ firmware applications for the ESP8266 using Windows. You can setup your development environment using Microsoft Visual Studio IDE. Using the accompanying serial terminal and flash writer application, you will be able to edit compile, link, flash and run without ever needing to leave the IDE. You can download Microsoft Visual Studio Comunity for free.
You can also use a third-party plugin to setup building and debugging automatically.
The following lists all the software components I have gathered in order to create and upload firmware for the ESP8266. Most of these components have been supplied by other hobbyists and are subject to change or move. Even the official SDKs supplied by Espressif seem to evolve rather quickly.
This particular version of the toolset is designed to work under Windows 7 or 8, 32 or 64bit. You can download a pre-built ESP8266 toolchain that contains Python and the ESP8266 SDK here. Alternatively you can gather the necessary components manually:
%comspec% /k E:\ESP8266\VARS.cmd
. When I click this I get a command prompt with the proper path already set.
* For the same reason, I also created a batch file that sets up the path before calling make:malloc()
for many larger structures that would be otherwise declared on the stack in other environments.
By default, all code goes into iram, which is only 32k, so it is easy to overflow that segment by linking in a bunch of stuff from the libraries or from your own code.
Use ICACHEFLASHATTR on your functions to make sure they go into irom instead. Irom resides off-chip on a 4M flash ROM, thus leaving about 240-440kB for applications. Although the final compiled program appears huge (about 180k in irom, and 28k in iram), most of this is library code that runs the Wifi and IP stacks. The actual user application is something like 8k.
The hardware design shown above also assumes that the switch will remain open at bootup, as GPIO2 needs to be high for the chip to boot normally.
===== Eclipse IDE =====
Looks like this is the best lead for that at this moment:
Eclipse IDE for ESP8266
======Arduino IDE =====
Go to Arduino site and download the IDE
Unzip it wherever
Go to the ESP8266 libraries and follow the easy install
Lots of programms for you to try
http://www.arduino.cc/en/Main/Software
https://github.com/esp8266/Arduino