ESP8266 Community Forum

- Thu Oct 23, 2014 10:55 am #1860

is there any way that the chip can be reset from software so that I could flash everything in software without physically touching the device?

If you use the FTDI cable, connect the RTS pin to CH_PD and CTS pin to RESET on your module.
The esptool-0.0.3 should automatically reboot ESP8266 into bootloader mode and back to normal mode after flashing.

Uhm, no. CH_PD needs to be pulled high always to make the module work at all.

An intermediate version of the tool is at http://atelier-klippel.de/esptool-0.0.3b.tgz, source only, and i have tested it on linux only as well. Should compile on Windows/Cygwin, just edit the target host type in the Makefile accordingly.

Have GPIO0 and RESET on the ESP pulled high through something > 10k ohms. Use an NPN or N-Channel FET on each line to pull down to GND, the transistors then being controlled through theRTS and DTR lines. RTS controls the transistor/fet on GPIO0, DTR the one on the RESET line.

Greetings,

Chris

- Thu Oct 23, 2014 10:56 pm #1880 Thanks Chris, I'll have a look at doing this a bit later, in the mean time I've just got quite good at jumping the right connections to put it into flash mode.

If you have time, do you think you could look at my other post here, it's somewhat related. It seems certain commands are setting flags in the flash memory which, if not cleared, block all the wifi commands. At the moment to work around it, I inject the two bin files produced by your tool into a blanked firmware using dd and upload that to the chip to clear the memory, but it means in the event of a power failure the system has to be reflashed to get it running again. I've tried running some of the disconnect commands on startup to try clear flags, but that just caused an error which reboots the chip.