It has been a while since I had time to write something here. But there is one thing which I found last week, which should be mentioned here. There is a great project on github which adds support for the ESP8266 to the standard Arduino IDE. This is good news because there are so many examples and projects for Arduino boards on the net which now can be used with the ESP8266 as well. Basically the ESP is now like any other Arduino board. To get this working you have to install the Arduino IDE on your computer. It will work on Linux OSX and Windows. In order to work with the ESP you will have to use the 1.6.x version. You can get it from the Arduino download page. I have tested it with the 1.6.5 version under OSX and Windows. Installing support for new boards is very easy.
- Open in the menu the Preferences and past the following URL at the field “Additional Boards Manager URLs:”
http://arduino.esp8266.com/stable/package_esp8266com_index.json
- Press OK
- Open Tools -> Board -> Boards Manager
- At the Type drop down select Contributed
- Now you should see a section for the esp8266 – klick on it and press Install. This will download everything you need and you are done with the installation
If the steps above have worked you can now select several ESP8266 based boards. If you do not have any of the mentioned boards you can always select Generic ESP8266 board.
There are also some examples which can be found on the github page as well. General information can be found on the homepage of the project.
