ESP8266 Community Forum

I have been playing around with OTA updates. I have successfully configured a NodeMCU and an ESP-01 (one of the ones with 1M of flash) for OTA and performed updates from my Linux laptop where I do my ESP8266 development. The network port on the NodeMCU was recognised immediately. It was a bit of a faff getting the ESP-01 working and I don't actually understand why it is now working when it wasn't before but it is.

However, I'd like to use my Chromebook to develop for the ESP8266. Chrome OS does support the CH340 serial chip but there is no Arduino IDE for Chrome OS. Chrome OS does also run Linux in a container so I can run the IDE from there but the container does not have access to the serial port so it occurred to me that perhaps I could upload sketches to a network port. Unfortunately, when I run the IDE in a Linux container it does not recognise the network ports hence my question.

How does the IDE detect new ports? It can see the two OTA devices when I run the IDE on my Linux laptop but not when I run it on Chrome OS in a Linux container when it does not recognise any ports at all. Is there something I can do to prompt the Arduino IDE to search for OTA ports?

I'm still interested in the answer to this question in general but I think I've found out why this isn't working on my Chromebook. The Linux sub-system networks is apparently NATted to the Chrome OS network rather than bridged. This is almost certainly why this didn't work.

This leads me to ask a follow up question. Is there some way I can manually tell the Arduino IDE that an OTA port is on say 192.168.1.210?

I didn't try it for esp8266, but it should be possible. Add a programmer.
https://github.com/jandrassy/ArduinoOTA ... twork-port
a problem could be, that the espota.py is not a tool known to Arduino builder. it is only a script in boards package folder