It’s only been a few months since the ESP8266 rolled out of some factory in China, and already the community is moving from simply getting custom firmware to work on the device to making the development tools easy to use. That’s huge – the barrier to entry is lowered, getting even more people on board with this very cool Internet of Things thing.
While the majority of the community is settling on using the Lua interpreter firmware, there’s still the matter of getting this firmware uploaded to the ESP. [Peter Jennings] of Microchess fame has been working on a Windows app to upload firmware to the ESP via a serial interface. There’s not much to it, but this will allow you to upload the community-created Lua firmware, set the WiFi credentials, toggle GPIO pins, and give you the ability to write a little bit of Lua in the same window.
If you’re looking for something that isn’t designed exclusively for Windows, there’s an alternative firmware flasher over on the nodemcu Github. This flasher also connects the ESP8266 to a network and uploads firmware. It’s a stripped-down programmer without a serial terminal or the ability to toggle pins, but there are plans for making this programmer cross-platform.
Very nice! Love LUA! Hope everyone can visit http://www.esp8266.com and contribute to the very quickly growing LUA forum there http://www.esp8266.com/viewforum.php?f=17 and also keep this awesome work going!
I’ve been using ESP8266 lua loader for almost a month, good tool.
It is always good to see support for legacy operating systems. :-).
Runs on 90% of the PCs in the world = legacy.
Unitard.
I believe Murray was referring to the fact that LuaLoader can run on Windows 95
LuaLoader does not flash the NodeMCU. It uploads Lua scripts and can be used as interactive serial terminal.
IT’s very useful.
Thanks Peter!!!!!
Why write this for winblows? It’s the antithesis of openness and the whole hacker ethos.
Not true at all.
>I don’t like it therefor it’s bad and should not exist because I think non open software is bad for hacking >:((!!!!
Ok there richard stallman. go back to fucking gcc.
@untrustworthy
I wish there were some way to look up the age of people who type things like winblows, lieberal, republicunt, et al. It’s the lowest of the lowbrow, practically unibrow, form of shit-talking that most folks outgrow by the time they’re in highschool.
Though it’s oddly appropriate for someone making broad, sweeping statements about the ethos of large and diverse groups.
The other useful and cross platform tool I use a lot is ESPlorer http://esp8266.ru/esplorer/ – it makes the process of uploading files and doing simple stuff easier. We aren’t quite at arduino levels of polish but all the tools are there and open source too!
The lua version doesn’t much excite me.
There’s a nice package of the C SDK for eclipse and Windoze here: http://www.esp8266.com/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=820
Personally, I haven’t had any hassles flashing the firmware to the ESP8266. I have a hand-rolled breakout board with jumpers to set flash mode, and in each separate project I’m playing with, I put a bat file that calls esptool.py to do the flashing. One click to flash, works every time.