HOWTO: Flashing ESP8266

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irsjohnk
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Re: HOWTO: Flashing ESP8266

Post by irsjohnk »

okashira wrote: Mon Jun 28, 2021 12:59 am Same problem. I followed instruction to a T. Flashing goes fine in arduino IDE. After I solder back the GPIO0, the only wifi network to show up is ESP-XXXXX.
I'm getting sick of soldering this jumper over and over.
I put wires on power ground and on the non ground side of the button ant removed the solder jumper then i just connect wires back and forth.
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Re: HOWTO: Flashing ESP8266

Post by nilsvr »

Hello,
I bought a built gen 2 charger board (V5aB3) but the wifi is not working at all (no signal found). I am trying to flash the needed file onto the wifi mod esp8266 using the arduino ide.
I am not sure which file to flash though. I tried with johu's esp8266-web-interface.ino and from Damien's charger github the chgV5Web.ino.

The first I am able to flash (at least the ide says 100% and then soft resetting) but with no change in behaviour.
The second one gives an error during compiling for not finding ESPAsyncTCP.h (not sure where to get that from).

Am I even using the right files?
Are they interchangable?

My steps are as per documentation:

Solder -> flash -> resolder -> plug in to the charger board to test
Jonr
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Re: HOWTO: Flashing ESP8266

Post by Jonr »

pilt wrote: Thu Jul 08, 2021 9:54 pm
I am also trying to flash Olimex MOD-WIFI-ESP8266, but have the same problem as you.

I changed some of the code and now I can connect to the module. My change to be able to connect was to change line 420 from WiFi.begin(); to WiFi.softAP("inverter","inverter123"); and line 416 to WiFi.mode(WIFI_AP)

It also seems the file system does not always load when you use the sketch data upload in the arduino software. I had to try about 4 times to get the SPIFFS data on the ESP. It always shows transfer is ok, but no files exisit on the device!

Also handy hint for everyone, you do not need to solder the jumpers on the Olimex board! If you hold the button when you connect the USB of the FTDI chip it to the PC you can flash it with no soldering:)
You saved the day for me.
Yesterday, I spent about 6 hours trying to use a nodeMCU in place of the Olimex. After finding this post and chaging the two lines of code you mention above, it all burst into life - Thank you for sharing.
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sigdigits
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Re: HOWTO: Flashing ESP8266

Post by sigdigits »

nilsvr wrote: Tue Sep 13, 2022 3:48 pm Hello,
I bought a built gen 2 charger board (V5aB3) but the wifi is not working at all (no signal found). I am trying to flash the needed file onto the wifi mod esp8266 using the arduino ide.
I am not sure which file to flash though. I tried with johu's esp8266-web-interface.ino and from Damien's charger github the chgV5Web.ino.

The first I am able to flash (at least the ide says 100% and then soft resetting) but with no change in behaviour.
The second one gives an error during compiling for not finding ESPAsyncTCP.h (not sure where to get that from).

Am I even using the right files?
Are they interchangable?

My steps are as per documentation:

Solder -> flash -> resolder -> plug in to the charger board to test
The files are "right", and the esp8266 is the supported one. I personally haven't been able to connect to the wifi with damien's code, and I haven't loaded the other because you need a pin purchased from patreon after 5 minutes of charging.

That error apparently happens when you have the "wrong board" selected, but I think it also may have to do with the many variations of these boards, etc.... I'm in the same boat and had to do some searching on git to get all the libraries sorted. Here's a link https://github.com/me-no-dev/ESPAsyncTCP

There is most of the necessary info on the wiki, but if you are making your own boards, or your code gets completely wiped it's a bit more involved
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Re: HOWTO: Flashing ESP8266

Post by nilsvr »

After investing some time without progress I chose to go the „work your job for the time and buy it route“ and just ordered a programmed olimex board from Johu. That worked flawlessly. So depending on how high you value your own work hour and how much fun you have with poking around in code written by someone else, it might be easier/better/cheaper to just buy a new wifi module… just as a reminder if someone is struggling and never thought of that option.
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Re: HOWTO: Flashing ESP8266

Post by Jonr »

This turned into another pain. I replaced the original Olimax device with a NodeMCU which initially worked well but then connection kept dropping. The web page would display but the setting would not populate. So, to keep in line with standard, I went the ESP8266 D1 mini route, which also worked OK then kept dropping the connection. Same issue as NodeMCU.

Not to give up, I put a serial breakout box between the WiFi device and the Zombieverter. This captured the problem. When starting from power up, the serial communication requests "fastuart" and changes the baud rate to 921600. The Olimex device see the request and changes speed. The NodeMCU and D1 mini see the request but do not change speed and hence lose connection.

So, at the beginning of esp-8266-web-interfaec.ino, change the line to "bool fastuartavailable = false" - it's about line 14 of the code (not comment)

This removes the baud rate change request and the D1 mini and NodeMCU now work reliably ... for now!
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Re: HOWTO: Flashing ESP8266

Post by AdrianB »

Very many thanks to jonr, Peakon28 and janosch for their very helpful posts. I have, after several days of trying, managed to flash my new Weimos D1 mini ESP8266 board and I can now see the web interface. It is faster and much more stable than my old Olimex module which died completely the other week.

I did encounter a few issues with the softwear versions which others may be interested in knowing how to avoid. The main problem seems to be that the SPIFFS filesystem is now (Nov 2022) depricated.
  • I couldn't find a CH340 driver for my old Mac (OSX 10.8.5). One is listed and it installs but the port never appeared in the Arduino IDE. I used a PC running Windows 10 instead.
  • I couldn't get the latest version of Arduino IDE (2.0.2) to work so I used version 1.8.13 - as recommended by Damien
  • After a bit of trial-and-error I used version 0.5.0 of the ESP8266 Filesystem Uploader
  • The Arduino IDE complained if the name of the .ino file and the name of its enclosing folder weren't the same. I renamed the folder to match the name of the .ino file in Johannes Web interface code
  • Johannes latest (Aug 2022) Web interface code has the file/folder structure required for the Arduino IDE so there's no need to make a new 'data' folder or move files about.
Once I sorted those things out the board updated and I could see the web interfece.

I'll update the Wiki page https://openinverter.org/wiki/Olimex_MOD-WIFI-ESP8266.
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