ESP8266 Community Forum

Hello everyone, I am new to the board and looking around seems to have lots of info and am excited to start my journey with the ESP8266 club!
Unfortunately Im a newb and have some questions so please be patient

Firstly I am using Arduino uno and micro's for my projects.

I have connected an esp to my uno and get the required connection to my home wireless network. Also learned along the way that the voltage divider rule (5 to 3.3v) does not work for power consumed so another good lesson.

My questions,
1. What is the reason for flashing the esp with something different?
2. Does flashing the esp with arduino ide actualy load arduino code to the esp so it is a standalone mcu?
3. If so does this mean the esp runs that code as soon as it powers up at boot time, so acting as a standalone arduino?

Thanks for any and all help.

Hi,

boblug wrote:1. What is the reason for flashing the esp with something different?

Because it has a powerful processor and enough resources : so, for most of projects, you can avoid having an arduino by putting your code directly in the ESP.
So YES for 2 and 3.

For my own project, I'm using an ESP every time a need wireless connectivity where as an Arduino is used for standalone projects and wire one (1-wire).

Bye

The ESP8266 running Arduino is not the same as running a sketch under and UNO type CPU. There is lots of stuff that happens in the background that needs to be serviced. If we do not give it an adequate time to run we will get watchdog resets.

This typically is not a problem but it is something that we need to be aware of. As long as our loop() does not take too long to run, or we are calling delay(), all the background tasks will be serviced. The end of the loop(), and the delay() functions is where the background tasks will run. There also is a yield() function that allows the background tasks to run.

Since I have started with the ESP8266 I rarely will use a Uno/Nano/ProMini board even if the project does not make use of WiFi. The ESP8266 has a lot more memory, a lot more speed. I/O is limited though. If I need more I will use I2C devices or I would move to the ESP32.