ESP8266 Community Forum

wow,

I have tried both 1,6,5 and 1.6.4 and download the "stable " !!! board platform for the esp8266

The platform.txt is hopelessly confused . firstly there is no entries for esptool.py ( which I have working for my ESP native development setup)

Secondly where people have suggested additions for esptool.py, the info relates to .bin files that esptool ( as in esptool-ck) generates

Am I right in assuming that the #create hex script in platform.txt

recipe.objcopy.hex.pattern="{runtime.tools.esptool.path}/{compiler.esptool.cmd}" -eo "{runtime.platform.path}/bootloaders/eboot/eboot.elf" -bo "{build.path}/{build.project_name}.bin" -bm {build.flash_mode} -bf {build.flash_freq} -bz {build.flash_size} -bs .text -bp 4096 -ec -eo "{build.path}/{build.project_name}.elf" -bs .irom0.text -bs .text -bs .data -bs .rodata -bc -ec

seems to produce a bin ( as in Blinky.cpp.bin) that is a single flash able file for the esp8266 ?.. but this seems to be aimed at the FOTA script that follows ( i.e. using espota)

surely the script need to produce a 0x00 and a 0x40 bin file that can be handled by esptool.py,

this seems to be completely missing


i.e. its not the missing esptool.py thats the issue , its the esptool ( -ck) that is in the create hex that seems junk to me


any ideas on how to straighten this out

The ArduinoESP is producing single binary since several months, and it much more easier to handle.
Also, ArduinoESP never placed binaries at 0x400000, even in the old days, it was 0x000000 and 0x100000.
The esptool.py is also working fine with such behaviour, even with single binary, although ArduinoESP doesn't use esptools.py, it is using the same esptool-ck to do the upload.

Madscientist wrote:its the esptool ( -ck) that is in the create hex that seems junk to me

Can you describe the bug you are seeing ?
If you confident about any bug related to esptool-ck, feel free to create issue on https://github.com/igrr/esptool-ck

Thanks , but the platform.txt entries I have refer to esptools.py for the upload, but the upload script refers to different hex files that output by the esptool-ck. also there are comments on the net that esptool-ck is deprecated in favour of esptools,py



the fact is if you download the boards module for esp and 1.6.5 IDE the scripts simply dont work

This core has actually never* used esptool.py. Some people have posted instructions on how to modify platform.txt to use esptool.py instead of esptool-ck, but such modifications are never guaranteed to work. The official way is to use esptool-ck without messing with platform.txt file.

Just for a test, I have downloaded a clean copy of Arduino 1.6.5, installed the stable version of the core, and it compiles sketches just fine.

@Madscientist, please help us help you Enable verbose compilation and upload output in Arduino preferences, then copy the full output you get during compilation and post it here. It's hard to diagnose the issue you have without actually seeing what goes wrong. Perhaps you are using one of those PL2303 based converters which don't work with esptool-ck on OS X? Could be, but without seeing the logs I just can't tell.

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*Well actually it did use esptool.py very early on, months before the public release. I tried various ways to make standalone executables out of esptool.py — py2exe, cxFreeze, pyinstaller to name a few. But none of the tools was able to produce binaries which worked on all OS X versions down to 10.6. So then I switched to esptool-ck which was written in C. There were obvious downsides to this approach but at least I could make a build compatible with older releases.