Everybody is welcome to come along to another ESP8266 workshop where we discover what can be done with the ESP8266.
We had some leftover things not quite finished on the 21st due to USB-Burnout (well I did) and needing to improve/streamline the upload process. But it looks like we’re good now.
So we will try again - playing with simple web servers.
@PaulG has offered to bring his water-pump from a tank. So we’ll be trying to install a wifi interface with a Webserver on that.
Unfortunately this will be another one I cant make due to work.
I’ve spent a few nights now with the ESP and lua firmware. I’m using ESPlorer to write scripts and upload, makes life pretty easy.
Overall quite cool things, however I’ve found the lua firmware to be a bit fragile.
I think I am over my cold, so should attend.
20150123) which is so far OK.cheers
That’s good.
Over the long weekend, I got a chance to add a web-input form so I can now control a GPIO with PWM from a web-page.
Fields could easily be added for all types of settings.
I’ll bring that along.
I now used the esp-07 -OK after a few hiccups.
Tried the adc input. Works but is limited to 0-1v, we need a generic solution to extend this range.
Next I will want to play with i2c.
I have a couple of the NODEMCU DEVKITS that I’ll bring along tomorrow night.
See here: http://hackaday.com/2015/01/01/a-dev-board-for-the-esp-lua-interpreter/
I have also made a start on a wiki page about the Workshops (mostly background info so far): https://wiki.makehackvoid.com/projects:group_projects:esp2866
See you tomorrow.
BTW, anyone is welcome to attend these workshops and the Space will be open from 6.30pm.
Following from today’s problem with the latest (20150127) firmware, when working with Chris, I validated that it is really broken (failed to flash my esp-07). I then looked up the repository
https://github.com/nodemcu/nodemcu-firmware/tree/master/pre_build/0.9.5
And it is now removed from there too. So there…
This is one hour I will never get back 
A couple of learning points I got out last night:
When you re-flash the firmware onto the ESP8266 it does not clear the WiFi settings that get stored in EEPROM. So if you’re having problems with a module, it requires flashing a “Blank” firmware first that writes blanks into everything, then reload the firmware. The blank firmware is available in the https://github.com/nodemcu/nodemcu-firmware repository under the bin folder.
There is a bug in the firmware we were using that caused the modules to keep restarting when connected to the MHV wifi. No idea what the bug is, as David and myself hadn’t see this at home. I’ve got a couple of spare routers at home which I can donate one for this as unfortunately it wasted quite a bit of time last night.
Was great to meet up with some other folk working on the same boards. It can save quite a few hours by sharing the tricks with these modules!
Some photo’s from last night:
there are a lot of spare wifi routers at MHV - I think they are on the shelves near the live router, but I’ll look for them tonight. There is also an ADSL modem with wifi router being used as a network switch that could probably have it’s wifi activated if that helped. You could also see if the wifi downstairs was any better.
Cool, I’ll do some testing next time I’m in.
I’ve just got the latest nodemcu firmware as of 27 Jan.
Big change is they’ve added floating point support to the prebuilt binary. Tested briefly with all the basic math operators and seems to all work fine, as well as printing correctly.
I really needed this for what I’m doing, so pretty happy with that change.
Really? I sure could not get it to even flash yesterday. I then tested again at home and it did not flash on my esp-07 either.
I then checked the github repository and noticed that it was removed. Checked again just now and it is still not there.
Does the boot message confirm this? Just do
node.restart()
and see the version message.
Eyal
Oh yes, really…
20150127 was the first firmware to have floating point, and I certainly have that…
I just cloned the repository at about 5pm
Are you sure we’re looking at the same repository? The nodemcu_latest.bin was last update 2 days ago.
I have MQTT working well. Installed Mosquito MQTT broker on a PC at home, the ESP sending updates and using MQTT.fx to view the msgs. Here’s some example code to loop sending msgs.
Server_IP_Address = "192.168.1.4"
Server_Port = 1883
published = 0
function periodic_publish()
published = published + 1
-- publish a message with data = hello, QoS = 0, retain = 0
m:publish("testing/nodemcu" ,"msg: " .. published,0,0, function(conn) print("sent") end)
collectgarbage()
end
-- init mqtt client with keepalive timer 120sec
m = mqtt.Client("clientid", 120, "user", "password")
m:on("connect", function(con) print ("connected") end)
m:on("offline", function(con) print ("offline") end)
-- on publish message receive event
m:on("message", function(conn, topic, data)
print(topic .. ":" )
if data ~= nil then
print(data)
end
end)
m:connect(Server_IP_Address, Server_Port, 0, function(conn)
print("connected, starting 5sec loop")
tmr.alarm(1, 5000, 1, periodic_publish)
end)
-- *****************
-- Just sending, so not bothering to subscribe
--******************
-- subscribe topic with qos = 0
--m:subscribe("test",0, function(conn) print("subscribe success") end)
--*******************
-- Not disconnecting since in a loop
--*******************
--m:close();
-- you can call m:connect again
I am looking at
https://github.com/nodemcu/nodemcu-firmware/tree/master/pre_build/0.9.5
and there is no 20150127… Normally ‘latest’ is the same as the last one listed, but I will download and check it soon.
Maybe they fixed it?
Eyal
You’re right, how strange. When they updated ‘latest’ in the update history they didn’t update the pre_build folder. Maybe they just forgot?
OK, I can now see that the old nodemcu_20150127.bin is very short while latest is full size.
It should be OK then. Good.