Nodemcu esp8266 as SPI programmer

Projects General Guidance
1

Hi everyone like the title said, is it possible to use a nodemcu esp8266 to program a winbond 25X32VSIG.
I saw some tutorials to do this with the arduino uno, but sadly I don’t have any official Arduino Boards or an SPI programmer to program it. :frowning:
The board support SPI.

Here is the datasheet: 25X32VSIG

2

You give us the link to the datasheet to that particular IC and we may think about it! :roll_eyes:

3

Oh sorry, here u have 25X32VSIG. Edited.

4

OK, well as I anticipated, this is a 3.3 V device which is perfectly suited to the 3.3 V ESP8266, indeed more so than the UNO as you do not have to be concerned about level shifting. In fact, it is the very same sort of memory as the ESP8266 modules themselves use for program and data storage.

So is it possible? Absolutely! :sunglasses:

How easy? I don't know. :grinning: But I imagine the code for the UNO should be reasonably easy to adapt. As you say, it is a SPI system. The ESP8266 has hardware SPI (I think) which is already dedicated to its own serial memory (while the NodeMCU confusingly brings these pins out even though you are not supposed to use them) but uses software emulation to implement SPI on any other pins you choose.

You just have to adapt the code. SPI is intrinsically timing-insensitive; a clocked protocol; hardware simply allows it to be used at its full speed. As this is flash, you do have to have code provision for handshaking to allow time to write.

Over to you! :grinning:

5

Paul__B:
The ESP8266 has hardware SPI (I think) which is already dedicated to its own serial memory (while the NodeMCU confusingly brings these pins out even though you are not supposed to use them)

They can be used for e.g. driving a display. This exact application may be a good use of that SPI interface as well. Definitely have to be really careful with it, and the general lack of documentation of the ESP8266 is not helping of course.

As it is basically a Flash chip, it shouldn't be too hard to copy data from the Serial interface onto it.

6

Thanks for the answers, i feel more confident now. I will give it a try and adapt the existing code. Hopefully it works

7

Did you got it working? I'm the same situation, I wanna flash a 16 pin chip for unbrick a device, this is the datasheet chrome-extension://mhjfbmdgcfjbbpaeojofohoefgiehjai/index.html?https://static6.arrow.com/aropdfconversion/6af4d713c49145f9f3a9e34f25696a7d7b0d7500/mxma-s-a0001548090-1.pdf

I seen this

So i guess it's possible