Announce: Free book on the ESP8266

[kolban]

I am pleased to announce the availability of a free book on the ESP8266. The book contains a wealth of information that will allow you to easily use the device for a wide variety of purposes. The goal is to continue to update the work in the months and years ahead to continually keep it current with all the latest findings, techniques, tips and tricks.

The book may be downloaded from the following page:

http://neilkolban.com/tech/esp8266/


Comments, feedback, corrections and suggestions for additional coverage areas are welcomed. Please use this thread for correspondence.

Enjoy!!

[hrsavla]

Dear Mr. Kolban
Did you tried "Sming - Open Source framework for high efficiency WiFi SoC ESP8266 native development with C++ language" for ESP8266 . (https://github.com/anakod/Sming). Try to add some details of it in your book.

Hemant Savla

[kolban]

Howdy Hemant,
Ideally, I'd love to cover everything related to ESP8266 ... the biggest challenge is the priority order of material. The September release is coming along fine and there will be a lot of coverage on the Arduino IDE and associated environments as well as new knowledge on the native Espressif SDK.

We seem to have gone from almost nothing a year ago to a plethora of richness in development tools and environments. In all environments there will be winners and losers. The popular and quality environments will stay and be enhanced while the less popular environments will wither and fade away over time.

The entry stakes are the Espressif SDK. Everything I have seen so far is based in one shape or another on that technology. Because that is fundamental, that will always be covered in great detail. In order to build a program using the Espressif SDK, tool chains and environments that support that will also be covered. Next on the list is community interest. If I am going to spend an hour writing on something, then it will be an hour that will benefit the most people and cover the most common questions. Today, that appears to be the Arduino IDE with its associated Arduino/ESP libraries. The next thing I sense is of greatest community interest is the Lua flavored programming from nodeMCU. Although I am aware of additional programming environments such as Sming, the apparent community interest is not bubbling up to me. I haven't performed any kind of scientific study on what interest people or not ... I am going solely by the flavors of questions that appear on these forums and the ESP8266Community forums.

Naturally, following on from what I just said, if the pendulum swings and the area with the most interest moves to a different area, I will follow ... however, back to the request, I'm not yet seeing Sming as having the same relative interest as the other environments and since those are not yet covered to my satisfaction, those become the immediate coverage areas.

Now ... for some pure opinion ... too many "environments" dilute the value and fragment attention that could be better spent collaborating on improving one. Which one should be the chosen one? That is where arguments of "blue vs red" start to creep in. In an ideal world, overlapping open source projects should combine ... but that rarely happens as someone will perceive that they have "lost ownership" ... which is a shame ... as a true open source project should not have conflict and be 100% community driven. A project should have multiple "maintainers" and once we have a core set of contributors ... if the reasoned "vote" of the contributors and the community wishes to make a change or go in a direction that is against the beliefs of the originator ... it should still go in that direction AND the originator not take his toys and go home ... but should continue to enhance the product along with the other contributors ... for the good of the community. However ... all this is idealism that is unfortunately rarely found in the real world.

Neil

[Amornthep]

Many Thanks for the book.

[kolban]

Howdy chums,
The September release is now available.

http://neilkolban.com/tech/esp8266/

Comments welcome as always. Much more content to come in the many months ahead.

Enjoy!!

Neil

[thuwrx10]

Wow, great job!

How about setting up a wiki, as everyone is able to contribute?

[kolban]

Howdy,
There is a great ESP8266 Wiki found here:

http://www.esp8266.com/wiki/doku.php

I've tried to write books as Wikis before and I find that it is orders of magnitude easier for me to write and edit in a word processor. In addition, my experience with Wikis is that few folks actively contribute. If we look at the Wiki I just listed, there have only been a handful of changes since May this year. The effort and inconvenience (to me) of managing a Wiki aren't justified. The hours it would take to make it a Wiki could be better spent researching and writing new content.

And there is also another objective ... I like to see my name on the cover

I've been compiling my notes on projects like this for years and making them available as tomes for the longest time. I'm kinda stuck in my ways now.

Neil

[rabbit]

my experience with Wikis is that few folks actively contribute.

I would do so.

One of the advantages of wikis is, you can structure the information very well using categories: One article/category per Lib, per API, per function etc.. Use templates to ensure that all articles of the same type have identical structure. Include Articles into other articles and so on …

http://esp8266.wikia.com/wiki/ESP8266_Wikia ???

If you would publish your book as wiki, we directly could improve it.

[geo.espressif]

Great book, thanks for putting it together! I'll be using it particularly for hardware setup.

[wwg]

Great job on the book. Thanks for sharing that (a lot of work clearly).

One place I see lacking everywhere is instruction regarding how to properly setup hardware flow control to this great little device. Unless that is done, it is never going to be reliable, if it works at all.

Searching the forums all over, everyone seems to be struggling with this (I discovered this while looking for a quick answer). Your book mentions RTS/CTS flow control but doesn't cover wiring. The ESP people advertise RTS/CTS support but never mention how to wire this up. After much searching, I eventually worked out (for ESP-07) that GPIO15 goes to DTR (on my usb serial adapter), and GPIO13 goes to CTS on the serial adapter (Note that I think the proper designation should have been RTS rather than DTR, but that is the way my usb device was labelled). Having this simple note alone, would have saved me hours 'n hours of messing with it.

Add to that, my usb serial device was a 5V/3.3V device, jumpered to the 3.3V position. This mostly worked with the exception of CTS. I eventually discovered that the GPIO13 driving CTS on the usb serial cable was producing a voltage of about 0.58V. This was ambiguous on the Mac OSX side (well below that point would have been better). To correct for this, I had to apply a 1K pull-down resistor. Then all was well behaved, and then life was good again.

If all devices from ESP-01 to ESP-12 use the same basic hardware, I would have to assume that hardware flow control uses GPIO15/13 as I mentioned above. Assuming all versions of firmware exploit that hardware for flow control, this information should be a huge help to those folks out there still struggling with "lost data" problems.