ESP8266 Community Forum

Hello,

I'm a CS student and I want to start developing on the ESP8266 platform. Could you suggest me some tips on how to setup my environment?

What IDE and tools are you currently using when developing for the ESP8266.

Thank you.

What platform are you using to develop on? Are you using a bare ESP8266 module or a NodeMCU dev board or similar? If you have a bare module you will need some adaptor from UART to USB and maybe a switch to enable flash mode. The NodeMCU and Wemos D1 have all this built in and automatically select flashing mode. A breadboard is very useful for mounting the module and hooking up leds, sensors and switches etc.

I recently started with some NodeMCU modules and on my Windows 7 laptop I have found that ESPlorer (which is a Java tool), NodeMCUFlasher.exe and Notepad ++ has been enough to get started with simple LUA based programming. There is a python version of the flasher which I have also used and some people prefer.

If you want to go Arduino compatible and write sketches, get the Arduino platform and install support for the version of ESP you have. But I have little experience of this so will let others answer for that.

You will also need to get your firmware for whatever you wish to use. I have used the online firmware builder very successfully, but failed miserably to install the toolchain on a virtual machine to compile my own. The arduino platform will compile and load for you (I think).

There are *many* instructables and youtube pages that will get you started.

Good luck