ESP8266 Community Forum

- Sat Dec 28, 2019 10:09 am #85079 I tried a few things with the ESP8266 but it didn't matter what project it was - it never worked as I expected it to work. Right now I have to do a project for a class at univeristy and I decided to do a (very simple) IoT-application which involves an ESP8266.
I am developing software for several years and for almost a year now I am working 20h/week as a C/C++ dev for embedded devices. I wouldn't consider my skill level as expert but I am not a complete beginner either.

This project I just talked about also involves a more conventional microcontroller from Microchip. I first developed software for that device. Even though I had some problems in the beginning eventually it worked fine. I started with the ESP8266 part of the project a few days ago.

Since almost a year now it was the first time I was taking a look at the ESP8266 NO-OS SDK on GitHub (which I was using in the past) - unfortunately there was this message in the Readme.md that NO-OS SDK is no longer in active development and only bugfixes will be released after december 2019.

So I decided to go for the RTOS SDK (I've never worked with freeRTOS). After a day of work I got the SDK running and compiling / flashing worked fine.
The first part was getting the HSPI-interface working. I was consulting the example project of the GitHub repository to get a better understanding of how things work.
I only have to transmit 3 very simple messages (each no longer than 5 bytes) to the Microchip controller. But for whatever reason it didn't work - the first message was transmitted correctly but the second one was missing three bytes (i.e. equal to zero). I wasn't able to figure stuff out so I asked in a forum - and the guys over there also didn't have a clue what was going on. Then after two more days (3 days for a simple SPI interface) things were working finally (and I still think the reason why it wasn't working is a bug in the SDK).

On the 4th day I decided to start with the Wifi-part. Repeating the procedure from before: looking at example projects and the very, very poorly described docs: https://docs.espressif.com/projects/esp ... index.html (really, it is missing SO MUCH information).
After two more days, wifi was also partly working (I was able to open an access point and drop an HTTP-GET request) but the SPI part wasn't fully complementary with the Wifi part.
So I decided to do a code cleanup (started yesterday) - after that, nothing worked.
And today I got no step further (that means the ESP8266 just keeps crashing).

Why am I not able to grasp the ESP8266 fundamentals? Everyone seems to be happy, so many projects are using the ESP8266. And I am sitting here and feeling like I am working with a piece of hardware with the worst software support ever and close to no documentation at hand .

I decided a few times to work with the Arduino IDE but I just don't like it (I am sorry).

Am I the only one feeling that way?

- Sat Dec 28, 2019 1:07 pm #85084 I have only worked with the Arduino IDE; it works and there a lot of examples using it.

I would say if you need to get something done and it will work; use it. You can always ignore it later if you move on.

- Mon Dec 30, 2019 11:24 am #85100 imho the worst part of working with esp8266 is debugging...
when things go wrong, and soon or later they do, sometimes it's hard to understand what's going on
whenever I can I try to debug and test my code on the PC where I can use a debugger
then I move further

if your application is really simple I'd give a try to NodeMCU FW (with LUA) or Arduino (I think you don't have necessarily to use the IDE)
if you want to have fun then RTOS is a good choice but be aware that multi-threading can be tricky
just start with something trivial and build on that

Espressif documentation is not that bad if you use it as a reference

everyone feels like you on some days
just don't give up

https://github.com/quackmore

- Mon Dec 30, 2019 11:38 am #85101 Thanks for your kind replies

I actually got my problem solved and the project is almost done. Maybe I cried a bit too hard

That accomplishment gives me hope to also be able to finish future projects.