Questions for you C programming ESP8266 guys re: the ESP SDK (1.2.0) and some possibly important info on WIFI and MQTT reliability. In the SDK: wifi_station_set_hostname wifi_station_get_hostname HOST ID…. If you do an IP scan on a windows network – ESP units will coming up as IP addresses – and…
Hackitt and Bodgitt discover Healthy Lighting
There has been a lot of talk in the press recently about the colour of lighting and it’s relevance to health. As far back as 2012, the BBC reported that NASA were to test “space-sleep colour-changing lights” on the international space station and since then there have been a number…
Espressif SDK 1.2.0
Just today a new release of the SDK from Espressif along with a patch. I note they have brought back the watchdog controls. Tried it on our code and up to now it’s absolutely fine. Still no sign of the PWM_STOP() function I’m waiting for however. There is a one-liner…
Fab-Fest Boston August
At the start of August I will be a guest of Espressif at the 11th Fab Lab Conference and Symposium in Boston. Espressif have asked me to do a 30 minute session talking about what we’ve been doing with the ESP8266 (which, as regular readers will know is quite a…
The Plan
So here’s the plan… in my home control article I pretty much tell you what we’ve done with our ESP-12 boards – we’re expecting one with no mistakes arriving this week – artwork is in the blog – I’ll confirm once we’ve tested it that there are no sillies. The…
Accessing ESP8266 Arrays in FLASH
A new challenge – the answer to which I will post in here. Accessing an ESP8266 C array in FLASH – i.e. never touching RAM until you actually access something. One suggestion was to ensure you use 4-byte variables.. so I tried this – it compiled – the array is…
Pebble Time
Just a slight diversion to tell you about my new Pebble Time watch. Pebble as you may be aware brought out a Kickstarter project some time ago which did well, a watch based on the same technology used in the Kindles – a black and white display that uses no…
New Provider
Regular readers will know that we’ve been having some capacity issues here at tech.scargill.net with our old provider “Unlimited Hosting” who turned out to be FAR from unlimited – and if you’re reading this – we’re now up and running with a new provider – Smart Hosting – not without…
Lua Revisited
Back in the dark ages when the ESP8266 was something new, I had a go at the nodeMCU software, essentially implementing the Lua language (or a subset of it) on the ESP8266. At the time I was not familiar with Lua but thanks to some of the excellent resources out…
ESP-13
Well, it’s looking like a good day for discovering more ESP-based boards. This time the ESP-13. APPARENTLY what sets this one apart is 16MBytes of FLASH… My question is – when will RAM be the bottleneck (personally I think it already is) – can’t add that as it is internal.…
ESP-210
Getting something new in the post is always fun (unless it’s a tax bill) and today was no exception. A little parcel arrived from Sweden this morning – an ESP-210. After carefully removing from the box… I plugged it in to my PC via it’s micro-USB connector. The right noises…
Downtime
Apologies to those of you trying to get to the blog yesterday. For reasons not yet known, the site came to a grinding halt and it took the service providers until this morning to bring it back online. It now appears to be working very quickly. Let’s hope that was…
ESP RTC Local Time
So there’s a nice project for the mathematically inclined. My ESP boards get the time (summer time and location corrected) via MQTT where that’s worked out on a more powerful Raspberry Pi. They also get dusk and dawn times. As it is possible on the ESP to get the time…
UPS for Raspberry Pi 2
Being a Sunday I was lying in bed early this morning pondering life when I was reminded that we had 2 short power cuts in a row the night before due to me overdoing the electric heaters here in our cave in Spain where we’re having a short break. The…
A new Day – A new Board
While waiting we’ve done ourselves a new board – it’s not too obvious but under that power supply / dc/dc convertor area – are three MOSFETS for PWM use and we’ve added a connector so you could stick some RGB serial LED strip straight onto a connector. GPIO16 is on…
More ESP8266 Woes
Updated Sunday 22/06/2015 : The thing about the ESP8266 is there is always something new to discover problems with!! So this week – The new PWM module appears to have issues and as we don’t have the source, we can’t fix them. Right now it will only do up to…
Non-Linear Brightness
On the lookout for a maths type.. I’m about to do a blog item on PWM on the ESP8266 – the reason for that is – they’ve some new code which currently isn’t 100% or I’d be writing it up now – but suffice it to say the maximum duty…
ESP8266 Debug
So – I’ve learned quiet a lot in the past few days.. Watchdogs on the ESP8266 Since Espressif SDK 1.01 or thereabouts, watchdog timer operation seems to have changed – delays of any length even in init() are out – or so it would seem? So I got onto Stanza…
3rd Generation ESP
At long last – a board without bugs! Well, we decided not to bother with the little ‘85 control chip but other than that everything works – no hidden repair links. The white board in the middle is the latest and it is sporting an ESP-12e though we’ve not attempted…
ESP8266 RESET
As often as not, when I reset an ESP8266 by using the system reset call in the SDK, after flashing – for example. if (strcmp(token, “id”) == 0) { if (isQuery) RESPONSE(“ID=%s\r\n”, sysCfg.base); else if (strlen(strValue)>=2){ strcpy(sysCfg.base, strValue); CFG_Save(); system_restart(); } The unit does not come out of reset.. the…