ESP8266 Community Forum

Due to a lack of administration I'd like to know whether there is a (simple) way to compare a source code I have in the Arduino IDE against what I actually baked into an ESP8266. Got a working program running for more than a year now and I'd like to add functionality, however, I do not know anymore which software version I actually used (I have several attempts named xxxx_v1.ino, xxx_v2.ino etc. It is probably the one with the highest version number but not sure...)
So can I download code or a checknumber from an existing ESP8266 and compare that to existing software in Arduino IDE? Or is there a simple verify function I missed?


As always thanks!

Debuggers like GDBStub or Visual Micro Serial Debugger may help you.

Once compiled, there's no way to compare source codes from different binaries.

The only easy option you (possibly) have is to:

• Extract the firmware from the ESP
• Set up the exact same Arduino version (and used libraries) you used back then and compile the sources you have.
• Compare the compiled binaries to the firmware image retrieved

Although I've never done this for ESP binaries, in theory you might be able to decompile/decode it and with educated guesses point to the actual source code you have in your collection; to my knowledge decompilers for the ESP's are non-existent, but maybe I'm wrong.

It will not help you now, BUT, I always put a serial.println giving the sketch name and version in my startup section.