ESP8266 Community Forum

I'm working on a project that requires building 40 devices, all based on ESP-12 modules. With the non-breadboard friendly board layout, multiple pins that must be high/low, etc, flashing many of them before building is turning out to be a pain.

Has anyone else come up with a good solution to this? Like some kind of programming jig or something?

Also I tried to wire one up the other day to flash and couldn't get it to communicate even though all the correct pins were setup, but I'm thinking it may have been because I tied GPIO15 to CH_PD to VCC rather than tying them individually to the power source, but I'm not sure. Unfortunately compared to Arduino pro minis, ESPs are very much less plug and play and much more finicky so this project is turning out to be a real hassle.

Personally, I've build a small board with 2mm female headers with push button on GPIO0 and RES, and each time I received an new ESP7-14/ESP12/ESP12E, I'm stuffing them with 2mm make pins right away, plug them on the dev-board, and uploading them with my sketch_buffet firmware.
It doesn't make upload faster, but no special wiring to do other than male pins.

Thanks for the reply, using 2mm pin headers and a flashing board is a great idea, I'll have to build that later on for future ESP projects.

I ended up going with buying small solderable breadboards, about as big as two AAs, which I'll wire up the ESPs to and attach pin headers for FTDI so I can reflash easily in the future.

This projects is a set of restaurant style vibrating notifiers we're using for big Connect 4 tournaments at music festivals. Each device is basically a 2 AA battery holder, an ESP-12 (ESP-1 would have been easier for this project since I only need one GPIO, but I had the 12s laying around), a couple resistors, a transistor, an LED, and a vibrator motor. I ended up realizing after posting this that I really needed protoboards attached to the AA holders and couldn't just wire everything up ad hoc if I actually wanted them to stand up to festival level abuse, so it makes sense to just wire up all needed connections on the protoboards to allow for reflashing in the future when I inevitably need to make software changes. Great idea to use a push button for REST and GPIO0 to get them info flashing mode, I'll add that to the boards.

I'm doing something like this but designed my own boards on which I put the ESP-12. I left a 6-pin header on the top left side that has:

GND
Reset
BOOT
serial-Rx
serial-Tx
3v3

And I have pull-ups and pull-downs as needed on the boot and reset to make them boot up normally if nothing is connected. But when programming, I have a little circuit with the right ones pulled high/low to put the ESP-12 in programming mode and flash it using the serial ports, providing 3v3 for power too. That way everything needed for flashing (or debugging by looking at serial messages) is all available from that header.