I have been having a good look at the state of development on the ESP8266 front and came across a couple of things that may or may not be of interest.
First off, for those of you who like LUA (Nick?) there is firmware and a handy development board called NodeMCU to use one of these and have access to the GPIO pins so you could make simple stand alone devices with WI-FI capability.
For the non LUA lovers there is an Arduino IDE core here that allows Arduino IDE to write, compile & upload to the ESP8266 or you could use the full Arduino compatible IDE with ESP8266 support here.
Hey - thanks for the post; I'm just starting to gain interest in these little devices (been following the progress since they were first announced on HAD last year, though). I knew about the NodeMCU and Lua - but the Arduino support is news to me.
I really hope that we as a community start to embrace these boards - they really need to become a "standard goto part" for wireless comms (and/or become incorporated into future Arduino boards - or become a shield or something - there's no reason for us to spend so much money on the current available solutions when there's this really low cost and fairly easy to use solution available instead).
cr0sh:
I knew about the NodeMCU and Lua - but the Arduino support is news to me.
I stumbled across a playground page (that I can no longer find) that pointed to the github Arduino IDE with ESP support and from there the arduino core add in to your existing 1.6.x IDE.
I tried the core addon with (fresh zip install) all versions >= 1.6.0 and it was an epic fail on all of them with reports it could not find the boards.txt on the later versions with board management and nothing on the earlier versions. I found and tried a Roger Clarke distro with no success so gave up and downloaded the full IDE with ESP support linked above and that worked without problem.
I managed to upload the WiFi sniffer example to the ESP-01 and it worked fine and then flash the firmware back to it's default AT mode. By now it was time for me to pack up and come home from work so have done nothing since.
I too could only get the IDE provided by IGRR to work. I had to copy a dll file to the root directory though (libiconv-2.dll).
I have found they are great for simple sensor networks, as talking to individual sensors becomes direct (and easy) from a sketch point of view. The routing is all background noise.
Some interesting stuff I've seen is people working on transparent TCP->Serial devices. A small mod could allow an ESP to not only provide remote uploading to an Arduino, but wifi access while running.
And being able to set the CPU to 160Mhz when in need of speed is great, I did not realize that clock speeds can be set at run-time.
pYro_65:
I too could only get the IDE provided by IGRR to work. I had to copy a dll file to the root directory though (libiconv-2.dll).
With more messing around I did manage to get the core addon to show up okay in the IDE but there was no uploader tool. I could have probably found the cause/cure but I have a working system so did not bother.
I have found they are great for simple sensor networks, as talking to individual sensors becomes direct (and easy) from a sketch point of view. The routing is all background noise.
I currently have only 8 pin (ESP-01) modules so lack GPIO pins but I will be ordering some modules with more IO soon. Unsure if it's worth getting the LUA board though not for LUA but for the ease of uploading sketches.
Some interesting stuff I've seen is people working on transparent TCP->Serial devices. A small mod could allow an ESP to not only provide remote uploading to an Arduino, but wifi access while running.
That would be a great asset/risk if you could update connected devices anywhere in the world. I did wonder if a LUA script could be written to emulate Serial for a bootloader.
And being able to set the CPU to 160Mhz when in need of speed is great, I did not realize that clock speeds can be set at run-time.
I also did not realize this. They are making great strides in new/updated firmwares that add extra features like this.
I have download the IDE and I have gotten the sniffer to work but I have not found a list of commands the work within the Arduino IDE. Can some one point me in the right direction. I just tring to get the basics working at the moment like send a command from the browser and get a read back from the ESP so a basic sever should work.