ESP8266 Community Forum

- Mon Aug 10, 2015 5:57 pm #25597

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.

That's also a great idea. Can you elaborate on what exactly your BOOT pin does?

- Mon Aug 10, 2015 6:07 pm #25598 It just connects to GPIO_0 but is held high with a 10k resistor so it'll always boot up if nothing is connected. Same with Reset.
Sorry, I should have just said GPIO 0 in the beginning, I just call it the boot pin since that's all I'm using it for, to run the bootloader or not.

I still have a "flashing board" that pulls those down as needed, and with a push-button for reset if I want. But usually I control that from a PC when I need to flash a bunch of boards one after another. It can be automated pretty easily. Right now they're standard through-holes but later on I could make them just PCB-pad test-points and use a bed-of-nails type thing to just drop a connector on there as needed.

- Wed Aug 12, 2015 6:51 pm #25847

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.

....

Hello Ben, coudl you provide the source code and maybe the breadboard layout? That would be a great help

- Fri Aug 14, 2015 5:21 pm #26020 I will be posting the code and build instructions later at some point when I have time, but this is more of a general question about projects involving ESP chips where you need to build many of something and need to get all the chips flashed quickly before building. So I'm looking for general solutions.