What a week this has been. Firstly apologies to everyone seeing 404 errors yesterday.
It turns out it was an issue with settings on the LightSpeed servers the provider is using…
I’ve had no end of issues with them… but hopefully this is now resolved. Meanwhile I’ve been doing a little more work on my Nano-base peripheral… read on..
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.
I recently completed some work on the 240*320 ILI-based boards on my kitchen-sink ESP8266 code which is designed to work with the home control system but basically is an ESP8266 board that responds to MQTT commands.
I’m very pleased with the display code but it came to my attention that the price has gone up recently – £4 - £7 depending where you go. So having completed some work on the tiny but beautiful 128x32 OLED displays which are DIRT cheap, (see also the 64 pixel versions) I thought I’d revisit the ESP code which already supports a number of I2c peripherals including my new Nano peripheral – and added in the SSD1306.
Continue reading SSD1306 on ESP8266
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. 
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
I’ve had a return to experimenting with my “nano peripheral”. You may recall I was buying all sorts of parts – A/D converters, port expanders etc. to help with my solar monitoring – and some time ago I had a shot at making an I2c peripheral using an Arduino Nano (you don't need to look this up).
Continue reading Nano I2c Peripheral
As the blog entry on using my home control code ROMS for ESP8266 is filling up and of course as much of the information is now dating I thought I’d do a new blog to bring everyone up to speed and move the conversation to this blog entry. The good news is - the code is now running under SDK 2.1.0 – i.e. bang up to date at the time of writing.
Firstly – yes, everything works – but the procedure for flashing ESP-12 etc has changed ever so slightly. I have updated the binary files to run on Espressif SDK 2.1.0 and updated the RBOOT code I use for OTA (over-the-air updating) to the latest version.
Continue reading ESP8266 Home Control Update
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
Mongoose OS is an open source Operating System for the IOT, supporting ESP32, ESP8266, STM32, TI CC3200 (Amazon AWS IoT integrated). Code in C or JavaScript. Time to give it a go! Updated (gutted) June 02, 2017.
Some time ago I tested Mongoose OS, early days and I had a lot of difficulties. This blog is a partial re-write because I see no reason to leave information lying around that is well out of date – there is a lot of that on the web already – and the current setup is MUCH easier to use than before. I have to tell you that the version changed as I was writing this so make sure you have the latest mos.exe
Flush with success at writing trivial code on NEO platform to control lights and displays, in Python, I thought I’d have a go at microPython on the ESP8266 and the ESP32.
Getting this working on the ESP8266 was trivial as the binary files start at zero – so really you just have to use your favourite tool to flash the chip (this is not the place to teach anyone how to flash chips incidentally).
I grabbed the binary file for the ESP8266 from here and set my usual programming software to start at location 0, rebooted the board, hooked up a serial interface at 115KBaud and pressed reset.
Continue reading microPython and the ESP
