ESP8266 Community Forum

Hello everyone. I getting started with the 8266. I have been playing with NodeMCU and Lua the past few weeks and gotten disgusted by having a 143 line Lua script stonewall me with an out of memory error.

So I am back to good old gcc and Makefiles. But I am confused by a plethora of SDK and toolchains available. It seems like every time I turn around I trip over another one. I began working with something called an "open SDK" getting it from this URL https://github.com/pfalcon/esp-open-sdk. I am not an arduino guy, but I noticed that when you install the 8266 plugin you get an SDK of some sort as part of the deal. And I hear about the (official?) Espressif SDK. I see that NodeMCU builds (some of them anyway) are built with the "NONOS" SDK. My head is spinning. Why so many SDK? Which do I want to use? What is open about the "open" SDK? Someone needs to write a guide to the ESP8266 SDK. Anyhow, I am just trying to get off to a proper start and would be grateful for advice and recommendations.

One way to thin the herd is to decide what it is you want to achieve with the ESP8266, and look for where the action is for that particular application. You might find that there's a popular package, which is built off of one of the SDK offerings... and that's the one you want.

NodeMCU SDK 1.4.0 build with 7 base modules + adc module will yeild 42k of heap memory
You can get the build from frightanic.com/nodemcu-custom-build/
I fought the mem prob using 0.9.6 then went to 1.4.0 and much better...
Your Flash must be > 512k

If you know C,C+,C++ then Arduino IDE should suit you very well..
I'm using 1.6.5 ,,, There are probs with 1.6.6, I could not get 1.6.7 to work[esp plugin?]
Like you I'm not a Arduino person, but you just need ArduinoIDE + espplugin + usbRxTx + ESP
and I managed to get Simple BLINK to work,

I'd like to suggest the basic interpreter from mmiscool personally all done through web interface using basic programming very nice if you have a nodemcu check the link in my signature to get started.

Worth a shot quite a bit is possible with basic not quite as buggy as LUA but really the real problem with the nodemcu is memory there are ways around memory issues like handling things via html I can pound the crap out of my nodemcu and it does not puke at all but if I do the same thing and serve the webpage off of my nodemcu then the buffer gets jammed within a few executions though the code never changes it just is not capable of serving a webpage and handling data being returned not enough physical memory however you can run the webpage locally and point get all the responses and actions your heart desires or so this has been my expirence with it... Thus far still working on different angles though.