HOWTO: ESP8266 isvhsopen indicator light

Projects
1

Here’s a project I made using an ESP8266. It lights a red or green LED depending on the status of isvhsopen.com. Put this on your bench at home and you won’t even have to open a web browser!

You can get it here: GitHub - vhs/esp-isvhsopen: An ESP8266-based indicator light for http://isvhsopen.com.

The main point of this is to help get people up to speed on programming these chips. I tried to write up decent instructions with lots of links. Let me know if you can get it working or not.

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8 Likes
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Sweet…
Can’t wait to get mine ESP devices and setup a big honking set of red/green lights at my house…

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So I set up a ESP-07 for this but ran into several problems:

  1. Tried installing the Linux version of the tools but got all sorts of errors on my Mint 15 machine… I know I mucked up its updating settings a while back so mebbe it’s time for a fresh install and give it another go.
  2. Thought about trying the Mac version but it looks a just as complicated.
  3. Figured I’d try the AT commands just to see if it works and it looks like I have to update the firmware to get them. I’ll try this first as there appear to be some Windows based firmware update apps…
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Yeah, the toolchain is a bit of a nightmare to set up. If you’ve got a linux or mac laptop, I can give you a hand at the space sometime.

In the meantime I could send you a precompiled binary blob. You should be able to just flash it to the chip using esptool.py. I’d have to hardcode your wifi credentials for you though, since those are right in the source code.

In fact if you just want to make sure your chip works, you can also use that tool to query its serial number and MAC address.

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I think someone setup the toolchain with vagrant, I haven’t had a chance to try it yet but it might make it easier for people to get going.

https://github.com/kmpm/esp8266-vagrant

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Got the AT commands working with a flash update…
Can’t seem to connect to my AP but I can connect to my neighbours open guest network so I think it works!!!
@lukecyca - I will take you up on the offer to compile the binaries. I’ll send you a PM with the info…

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Got it working with @lukecyca’s help (Thanks) to compile the code.

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I used the ESP-07 version and got some breadboard adapters from here:

Now if I can only get some sort of build environment installed I can go crazy. There is a Arduino like IDE available but it crashes on my XP laptop so I’m going to try the Linux version.

1 Like
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Hi @packetbob,

Any spare breadboard adapters? I would be happy to buy one or more :slight_smile:

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Unfortunately no…
I do highly recommend these as they have a small footprint and seem decently made…
They also have a single button that does both reset (if you push quickly) and puts it into the programming mode (if you hold it for a bit)…
They got here pretty quickly (3 weeks mebbe)…