Apologies to those of you trying to get to the blog yesterday. For reasons not yet known, the site came to a grinding halt and it took the service providers until this morning to bring it back online. It now appears to be working very quickly. Let’s hope that was…
ESP RTC Local Time
So there’s a nice project for the mathematically inclined. My ESP boards get the time (summer time and location corrected) via MQTT where that’s worked out on a more powerful Raspberry Pi. They also get dusk and dawn times. As it is possible on the ESP to get the time…
UPS for Raspberry Pi 2
Being a Sunday I was lying in bed early this morning pondering life when I was reminded that we had 2 short power cuts in a row the night before due to me overdoing the electric heaters here in our cave in Spain where we’re having a short break. The…
A new Day – A new Board
While waiting we’ve done ourselves a new board – it’s not too obvious but under that power supply / dc/dc convertor area – are three MOSFETS for PWM use and we’ve added a connector so you could stick some RGB serial LED strip straight onto a connector. GPIO16 is on…
More ESP8266 Woes
Updated Sunday 22/06/2015 : The thing about the ESP8266 is there is always something new to discover problems with!! So this week – The new PWM module appears to have issues and as we don’t have the source, we can’t fix them. Right now it will only do up to…
Non-Linear Brightness
On the lookout for a maths type.. I’m about to do a blog item on PWM on the ESP8266 – the reason for that is – they’ve some new code which currently isn’t 100% or I’d be writing it up now – but suffice it to say the maximum duty…
ESP8266 Debug
So – I’ve learned quiet a lot in the past few days.. Watchdogs on the ESP8266 Since Espressif SDK 1.01 or thereabouts, watchdog timer operation seems to have changed – delays of any length even in init() are out – or so it would seem? So I got onto Stanza…
3rd Generation ESP
At long last – a board without bugs! Well, we decided not to bother with the little ‘85 control chip but other than that everything works – no hidden repair links. The white board in the middle is the latest and it is sporting an ESP-12e though we’ve not attempted…
ESP8266 RESET
As often as not, when I reset an ESP8266 by using the system reset call in the SDK, after flashing – for example. if (strcmp(token, “id”) == 0) { if (isQuery) RESPONSE(“ID=%s\r\n”, sysCfg.base); else if (strlen(strValue)>=2){ strcpy(sysCfg.base, strValue); CFG_Save(); system_restart(); } The unit does not come out of reset.. the…
ESP8266 Bliss
You may have seen comments in here from Richard Burton about his bootloader. Well, I have to tell you – what a game-changer. If you look at a previous blog where I showed you how we’d moved code from the fairly normal 0x40000 starting point down to 0x20000 – freeing…
Pi2 Keyboard
I’ve been using Raspberry Pi2 now for over a month and while VNC and winSCP are indispensible, when you’re having trouble with the Pi (WIFI?) there’s nothing like controlling it directly. I’ve been swapping monitors back and forth and finally gave the Pi a screen of it’s own. I took…
ESP8266 SDK 1.11
Just a short one for those of you who’ve not tried the new Espressif SDK update yet (SDK 1.11). I noted a pair of commands “system_param_load” and “system_param_save_with_protect” which appear to replace the need for the load and save functions that TuanPM uses in his code in /mqtt/config.c – so…
ESP8266 Guesswork
My thanks to Richard Burton for some updates. This entry which started out as guesswork (but with a practical aim) turns out to have been not that far off – I’ve amended the text and it’s now hopefully a decent guide to memory use in the ESP8266 etc… (bear in…
The Best Laid Schemes
“The best laid schemes of mice and men”… well, there’s a lesson here. I left Spain a few weeks ago with a Raspberry Pi running the watering system and more – I had a hard drive to ensure the MYSQL database would not screw up the SD, I had checks…
Espressif 1.10 SDK Experience
Update 04/June/2015 I must say I cannot really gripe about support from Espressif……. I received an email this morning to ask me to use another FLASH tool – that failed – same result – code compiled under the old 1.01 SDK worked – code compiled under 1.10 SDK failed. Eventually,…
ESP8266 SDK 1.10 Different
Something odd here. So I’ve downloaded the latest ESP8266 SDK version 1.10 and while one of my bigger projects is ok, another fails miserably. If you look at some of the items below… PIN_PULLDWN_DIS for example – that is most definitely in EAGLE_SOC.H in the previous version – yet…
Apologies
Apologies to anyone who tried to register yesterday or this morning. In an attempt to reduce false registration I added a plug in to include captcha – well that worked a treat except in the process it altered the responses to new uses so that they didn’t get a password…
Raspberry Pi 2 Logging
Here’s a thing… if you’re using a Raspberry Pi as some kind of central controller for long-term home control or other data logging application you will no doubt be aware of the potential issues with FLASH memory. The Pi will let you use Linux and log stuff and shove information…
ESP8266 FLASH– Something to Ponder
Update: You’ll see from the original article before the break, I was having serious problems with ESP-01 versus ESP-12 etc where code running in the 12 would simply not work on the ESP-01. Well, it turns out none of this was helped by the MAKEFILE.. You’ll often see references to…
ESP8266 Progress
There can be no doubt that I still have some way to go in terms of reliability with my test rig in Spain before putting this stuff in charge of the heating back home in the UK: Raspberry Pi 2 is on an un-interruptible supply but does not 100% recover…