A quick note – I have made all of my sites secure (https://) and so the original OTA site for my ESP8266 ROMS (www.scargill.net) is no longer appropriate.   roms.scargill.net  is now the place to go (which redirects elsewhere and also has a pretty interface)  –   sorry for any inconvenience. The files are not seen if you visit the site, just a home page - you simply enter the name of the site followed by slash and the rom name - for example...  roms.scargill.net/rom.bin

Files available are:

blank.bin

esp_init_data_default.bin

rboot.bin

rom.bin

romx.bin

blank.bin and esp_init_data_default.bin are needed for utterly blank ESP12 units.

rboot.bin and rom.bin are for my new ESP8266 code (which no longer supports ESP-01)

rboot.bin and romx.bin are for my older ESP8266 code (no longer developing that version but it is fine and might run fine on an ESP-01 without OTA)

I have to say, it felt a little like Christmas today when the Correos post-lady turned up with a plastic container full of packages from China for me.

Among the many items in today’s post were the two you see above – a WEMOS board (i.e.  ESP-12 + power supply) which includes an OLED display. As you’ll know I’ve recently added the SD1306 display to the commands on my ESP8266 code – looks like they’ve done the same but gone a stage further and added the actual display to the board.

(While I'm here - note the site is now https:// rather than http://  - if anyone has issues (despite refreshing the browser) - do please let me know.

Continue reading Today’s Mailbag →

The  issue of running out of FLASH space on the ESP8266 is now resolved – if you are interested in how FLASH memory on the ESP8266 works -  especially using the Unofficial Development Environment with the official SDK and RBOOT works – you may find this useful. I now have more FLASH than I know what to do with...

Continue reading Challenge for the Day →

In recent previous articles I’ve been working with various displays and various processors – and one thing that comes to the fore is the importance of fonts. TTF fonts are pretty useless for small microprocessor projects as the processing overhead can be significant – and though there are many standards out there – if you want to do this all without spending money – choices are limited. In addition to that, when it comes to icons – the chances of finding a readymade font with all the stuff you need and none of the stuff you don’t need – are pretty slim.

Continue reading Fonts Galore →

I’ve spent WAY too many hours working on ILI9340 display updates for my ESP8266  kitchen sink C code but at least now I'm getting somewhere - that is - fast, easy serial or MQTT access to the display with multiple fonts.  Note - that initial tests indicate this also applies to the ILI9341 -  just over £5 from Ebay at the time of writing (Aug 2017) - https://goo.gl/DHACMw I got sick of trying to find decent fonts in bitmap mode (most of them look like something out of the 1990s) and decided the only way was to go GCLD – which is a relatively simple format with the advantage that there is a free Windows convertor/editor which takes in any old TTF font – of which there are millions – and converts them. Little did I know how many hours I'd need to put into making it work.

Continue reading Silence of the Lambs →

Following on from earlier articles – this is as much a collection of notes than anything else – and there’s a demo video in here of the SD1306 using the Luma library on the Orange Pi Zero.   After months of thinking the only SBC I’d get working with I2c was the Raspberry Pi it transpires that I was miles out and more and more boards are succumbing to cheap display nirvana.

Continue reading SSD1306 with Python →