ESP8266 Community Forum

I sort of got funnelled into this...

Our 2 wizards have been doing a magnificent job of pushing ESP_Basic to ever new heights, and I know they are itching to improve the browser Editor which has been a bit left behind, but perhaps this may reduce some of the urgency for that distraction.

I've just discovered that Notepad2 (and probably others) can offer a great ofline editor for ESP_Basic scripts.

It's not particularly useful for run-of-the-mill type stuff cos you're better off doing that direct in the browser editor - but if you've got an obscure problem somewhere, or have a big script with lots of text, the syntax-highlighting could be a god-send.

You need to see for yourself because words can't do it justice, so I've included a big 830 line script I'm working on to demonstrate things even though I'm not quite ready to publish it just yet... needs another bug-fix release of ESP_Basic to allow it to run and be stable before I can tidy it up enough to publish.
Feel free to try it though (if this one runs) if you wish, cos I think there may be things of interest to a lot of people.. just don't whinge that things like Blinks doesn't work (which got broke with the latest release).

What you might want to pay attention to are the self-contained Doc pages (click top left ? button), not just because they may have information of interest, but for the impressive fact that ESP_Basic let's you DO this sort of thing ... 10 full pages of text documentation included along with a wide variety of program functionality, and it could be even more except that I've maxxed out the available buttons (if you un-comment 'Bugs' entry in the Footer at bottom of script it crashes because 1 too many buttons being used).
And it runs on my dev module even when I re-format it as 512K.

Never mind the interactive network capability that's underneath... the screens and their navigation alone show what a capable power-house ESP_Basic has become.

Anyway, to get back to topic, perhaps now you will be able to appreciate just how useful a syntax-high-lighted offline editor could be.

I downloaded Notepad2 free from http://www.flos-freeware.ch/

Paste in the Basic script, select View / Syntax Scheme, then select VBscript or VisualBasic from the list, and eureka... syntax high-lighting for ESP_Basic straight out of the box!

Holy Cow thats a lot of lines of code! Glad to see that the esp can work with that much code. All the new features are really making this an awesome port! Another big thanks to the captains!!!!!

Yes, I think ESP_Basic is amazing... and I'm using just a fraction of its power and capability simply to achieve some useful functionality which I want to include in the EasyNet demonstrator program.

All those bloatware pages of info are just unnecessary fur coat... but they might just as easily be 10 different multi-functional and dynamic server web pages - which is a lot of potential server to be so easily stuffed into even a 512K ESP.

And 830 lines ain't actually that much compared to mmiscool's announcement a short time ago that cicciocb has increased the line capability to 2000... that's over double the size of my little bloatware.


So that's why I needed to let people know about the potential benefits of being able to use something like Notepad2 with it, cos it opens up the possibility of creating some seriously useful Servers and Apps with ESP_Basic.

The only 2 real limitations I've come across are imposed by the max limit of available buttons and other web components, but considering I've been deliberately pushing that limit to test it, in reality I don't think it's likely to be very restrictive very often. And if that does start becoming a problem, the guys could raise the limit if it became necessary.
The other limitation is that if you have long html pages you can fill up the buffer and cause problems, but it's simple enough (and usually preferable) to be splitting longer pages into more manageable shorter ones, assuming you have enough buttons left to be able to navigate the extra pages.

ESP_Basic is a different beast to what it was even a few weeks ago when I fortuitously stumbled across it, and I don't need to be a fortune-teller to say that it's also going to become a different beast in the future, cos I know there's so much more that the guys want to add when time permits, and when they get bored, I have some suggestions for them.

ESP_Basic is on an exciting journey, and it's nice to be along for the ride.

HI Electroguard,
as your nick suggest this is really "Electroshocking" code!

I'm very happy to contribute at this project, in particular the improvement removing the 255 lines limitation.

I think that the ESPBasic is now ready to do some "autonomous" tasks and not only used as a "satellite" or "peripheral" of other controllers such as Arduino, .... .
The language contains now all the elements permitting to write a complete program, control external peripherals, interface with other devices and so on.
The "big" program you wrote it's the evidence that this is possible and is thanks to people like you that, sharing their work, permit to discover this potentiality to others.

I hope that more and more people take interest into ESP Basic as this is the motivation that drives our efforts.

CiccioCB