I'm a very experienced software engineer and also originally studied electronics and telecommunications, I'm a pretty competent hardware tinkerer but a bit rusty.
About a year ago I began to play around with ESP8266 devices with a view to attaching them to an MCU (an STM32 based board) board and thereby getting WiFi for the MCU board, this was really a personal interest project.
Part of that work entailed me getting detailed understanding of the ESP8266 from a coding perspective so I created a .Net C# test app and class library (purely as an aid to understanding the ESP8266 technicalities).
This work went well but I shelved it about a year and now I'm getting it back running again.
My device is mounted on a USB board that plugs into PC, there my code interacts with the device asynchronously over a serial COM port.
This has given me a good low level grasp of the device and the code can successfully receive large volume of data over a TCP link (driven by a separate test app that connects to the device one its connected to my network).
Eventually I use this code as a reference so I can create either C or C++ equivalent (having done all the messy debugging already) code for the device when attached to the MCU board.
My problem now is the devices I have seem very out of date, attempting to update them over the network routinely fails so I've ordered some other boards that I think will let me get them up to date.
Here is the version details of the devices now:
AT version:1.3.0.0(Jul 14 2016 18:54:01)
SDK version:2.0.0(5a875ba)
v1.0.0.3
Mar 13 2018 09:35:47
So, questions:
1. Is this really seriously old?
2. There are three version numbers listed altogether, what exactly do they represent?
3. Is it likely that many features (like setting hostname CWHOSTNAME= ) are just not present in this old version?
4. Where do people buy these devices that are much more up to date already?
Thanks !