- Sat May 16, 2020 4:59 pm
#87137
Hi Folks,
I am looking for some advice on getting my head around programming an ESP8266 without resorting to the Arduino IDE/language. I know its there and very plug and play but I am looking to learn something. I'm an electronics/electrical engineering student (just finished first year) and I'm on a co-op for my local makerspace. They want me to develop some things with ESP8266s. Right now the exact project details aren't crucial to this post as I am just trying to get setup to do some coding.
I do have some C coding experience with 8 bit PICs but no real experience in microprocessors unfortunately.
What I have tried:
1. Python based commandline tools - recommended on Espressif's site for the rtos_sdk. Got the tools running via Windows Subsystem for Linux but could not verify that hello_world was running due to what I think might be WSL issues with the nonstandard baudrate the debugger speaks.
2. VsCode + Platformio - Got this running and the board blinking but then when I tried to recreate the hello_world from the rtos_sdk I discovered that the esp_system.h is wildly different (a missing esp_chip_info_t macro tipped me off) from that provided by espressif. So I could just roll with the changes made by platformio but they don't have the same caliber of reference documentation as espressif and I don't want to take the time to figure what else is different in the platformio files.
I am looking for a relatively painless way to just get coding with these things (perhaps the Arduino is the only way). I realize trying to engage with the RTOS (I've read just about the first 100 pages of the freeRTOS book) vs non-os is a whole thing as well. Are there good resources I should be looking at? When I factor arduino out of my searches for 8266 reference materials I find very little.
I am looking for some advice on getting my head around programming an ESP8266 without resorting to the Arduino IDE/language. I know its there and very plug and play but I am looking to learn something. I'm an electronics/electrical engineering student (just finished first year) and I'm on a co-op for my local makerspace. They want me to develop some things with ESP8266s. Right now the exact project details aren't crucial to this post as I am just trying to get setup to do some coding.
I do have some C coding experience with 8 bit PICs but no real experience in microprocessors unfortunately.
What I have tried:
1. Python based commandline tools - recommended on Espressif's site for the rtos_sdk. Got the tools running via Windows Subsystem for Linux but could not verify that hello_world was running due to what I think might be WSL issues with the nonstandard baudrate the debugger speaks.
2. VsCode + Platformio - Got this running and the board blinking but then when I tried to recreate the hello_world from the rtos_sdk I discovered that the esp_system.h is wildly different (a missing esp_chip_info_t macro tipped me off) from that provided by espressif. So I could just roll with the changes made by platformio but they don't have the same caliber of reference documentation as espressif and I don't want to take the time to figure what else is different in the platformio files.
I am looking for a relatively painless way to just get coding with these things (perhaps the Arduino is the only way). I realize trying to engage with the RTOS (I've read just about the first 100 pages of the freeRTOS book) vs non-os is a whole thing as well. Are there good resources I should be looking at? When I factor arduino out of my searches for 8266 reference materials I find very little.
