ESP8266 Community Forum

- Thu Nov 13, 2014 6:26 am #2542

I agree that having Lua on the ESP8266 can be very useful, but in my experience, the "not for now" and the dot com site "comming soon~~~" is a good indication that someone will try to sell me something soon, and that opening the sources will never happen.

I think you could be right.

Apparently a lot of work has been put into the development AND the documentation, that may point to a professional (read commercial) product. Wouldn't mind to pay a few dollars for a well supported commercial product though.

I uploaded the bin to my ESP8266 and it seems to really work well. I'm not familiar to Lua, but had no trouble getting basic commands tested. Anyone can come up with a 'print("hello world")', right!?

This is my "toy" for the coming week.

- Thu Nov 13, 2014 11:12 am #2553

But……. it's a cool development that zeroday has published! Especially for people that will/can not handle C development it's an excellent way of programming the ESP8266 without struggling with compilers, linkers, etc. And for the rest of us, it's an excellent tool for prototyping, converting to C can be done later.

I agree that having Lua on the ESP8266 can be very useful, but in my experience, the "not for now" and the dot com site "comming soon~~~" is a good indication that someone will try to sell me something soon, and that opening the sources will never happen.

I hope I am wrong.

well, you are right, the coming-soon website try to sell something, it will be a development kit with esp8266+usb-ttl.
but the product is designed for someone who have very less embedded C programming experiences and ZERO hardware experience.
not for someone who is familiar to esp8266 chip, gcc compiler, firmware hacking and sdk stuff.
It will be a "plug and play" development kit, especially for someone have javascript, nodejs, python or arduino experiences.

The picture here is, everyone can download and use this firmware for free, include people who have their own made module.
But everyone should write lua script use the "stable" api, if someone release their lua script, others can use it without any modification.
I hope after some time, there are many lua scripts for this firmware, and connect things to net will be as easy as "hello world".
Anyway, selling a firmware is not a good business for me, nobody will buy a firmware, especially in China.

So, "for now", my concern, open source will produce a lot firmware with diff api, makes lua scripts not compatible.

- Thu Nov 13, 2014 11:55 am #2554

the coming-soon website try to sell something, it will be a development kit with esp8266+usb-ttl.
but the product is designed for someone who have very less embedded C programming experiences and ZERO hardware experience.
not for someone who is familiar to esp8266 chip, gcc compiler, firmware hacking and sdk stuff.
It will be a "plug and play" development kit, especially for someone have javascript, nodejs, python or arduino experiences.

I think there may be a market for such a board. My suggestion is to support the ADC, with supporting API calls.

I hope after some time, there are many lua scripts for this firmware, and connect things to net will be as easy as "hello world".

I've been playing with the API. I like it. Have not used ALL commands but it works very well, excellent job done!

Maybe I'm am missing something but I have found no support for uploading Lua scripts. I understand the concept of the "init.lua" file that runs at boot time. Tried it with a simple command and it works.

Up till now I have used the line mode of Coolterm (on a Mac) to enter the Lua commands. For simple tests that's OK, but for larger scripts that's not usable. I tried uploading a text file using the Coolterm function, but that did not work well. It looks like the input buffer of the ESP822 is overloaded, or that new lines are sent before the previous line was processed by the ESP. Then it reports mysterious errors in lines that work OK in the line mode.

So my question is : What is your proposed way to upload Lua scripts?

Thank you for a wonderful development!

- Thu Nov 13, 2014 12:08 pm #2557 If you want to run something when system started

Code: Select all  --init.lua will be excuted
  file.open("init.lua","w")
  file.writeline([[print("Hello, do this at the beginning.")]])
  file.close()
  node.restart()  -- this will restart the module.


and use dofile, require ets to load other file in init.lua