I am working on a site at the moment and the company installing all of their equipment (bespoke led lighting effects) have added wifi boards to all of their controllers.
I was surprised to see they use either Teensy 3.2's or Nano's as their main controller.
I asked the guy what the purpose of the Wifi board and he said it was for OTA updating.
Anyone got any useful links for learning that? I have had a Google but not found anything yet.
I should add this isn't my job! I am looking at it from a hobby angle, but I don't understand that concept and would like to learn it.
I use OTA updating only on ESP boards, where i am connecting the board i update, to a wifi source that provides the new code this shows how to do that in several ways. It can be expanded to do that through an ESP to other boards, though i suspect, not directly through the IDE (but you may never know)
The proces would be slightly different, The binary file gets downloaded into the wifi board, which will then act as an uploader to the board, through the UART.
the problem with using WiFi for OTA (or even remote data collection and control) when installing devices on customer sites is you could require access to the company WiFi network and internet connection which they may not be happy to provide.
In practice I tend to use LoraWAN and/or GSM modems - even then one can have problems with coverage and signal strength particularly deep inside buildings or even underground.
With data collection and control the volume of data transferred and how often is critical. If a few bytes even hour LoraWAN is fine - if a thousand bytes a second one ends up with Ethernet or WiFi.
The link you got in anwer #1 explains the concept very well. Start with a maker friendly ESP8266 on a WemosD1 or NodeMCU, and try the 3 described concepts: Update with IDE, update via webbrowser, update via HTTP. It makes the distribution/deployment of a new version very easy.
It's one of those subjects I would just like to understand a little better.
I would like to be able to communicate data using the wifi modules and that is also something I need to get better at. I know that basics, but certainly not fluid with the subject
Yeah that is a bit funny, it does have the OTA spiffs version, anyway have a look at he BasicOTA example under ArduinoOTA, also on github
The difference may be in the core version you are using, the tutorial is quite old (for ESP time scale)
There is a sketch called 'mDNS-SD_Extended' though which will also work.
Keep in mind that the examples shown in the IDE may only show up when you have an ESP8266 board selected in the board manager.
