ESP8266 Community Forum

Hello everyone,
i'm new to the ESP8266 world.
I just bought a NodeMCU device and in order to make it work i had to use NodeMCU flasher and flash the built in firmware which it turns out to be quite old.
Since i prefer arduino rather than lua programming i was wondering if there is a newer firmware (from espressif) to use.
Moreover when compiling with arduino ide which sdk is used? is the firmware updated during this process?

Regards,

I have been wondering the same. recently I got my esp on some sort of boot loop while playing around with OTA updates. Arduino IDE could flash new software in but boot loop was still happening (not sure if I use correct terms). I too found some random old nodemcu flasher that I got working. First it didnt fix the problems but then I found that I need to increase flash size. With that and old nodemcu flasher -> flashed the firmware. Then uploaded my code from arduino IDE. Then the ESP worked again as expected. I'm using ESP-12-F. I wasnt able to run esptool on windows.. not skilled enough :o

But after this episode I started wondering what is the correct firmware to have when using Arduino IDE.

Comment from this webpage:
http://www.whatimade.today/esp8266-easi ... am-so-far/

The Arduino IDE Compiles the code into a NEW binary firmware using the official ESP8266 SDK and then flash it to the ESP8266.
It has nothing to do with the nodeMCU. The NodeMCU is one single firmware which supports script language and file-system. With the nodeMCU you never really compile anything after flashing the firmware once.
If you had the nodeMCU firmware on the ESP8266 and then you used the Arduino IDE, the new code you wrote will REPLACE the nodemcu firmware

So to my understanding if the newest Arduino IDE is used and boards are up to date you are on the safe side. Arduino IDE will create and flash new firmware. Can someone confirm this?

Now just need to figure out what all those arduino settings mean and what should be used when uploading code. Or should I say when flashing firmware?

You don't need any firmware to use Arduino sketch, it as its own built-in into the resulting binary.
If you wish to know which version of the SDK the Arduino is using, looks at the file there :
(windows path is a bit different)