codebender:esp: Cloud IDE for ESP8266 & ESP32 with zero setup & built-in OTA updates

[Fay Candiliari]

Hello everybody!

This is Fay from codebender, the online IDE for programming Arduinos, and I’d like to share our news with you!

We’ve created codebender:esp an easy-to-use professional Cloud IDE with the advanced capabilities of the Eclipse Che IDE, tailor-made for the ESP8266 & ESP32 chips, that allows you to provide Over-the-Air updates to your devices or keep track of their status no matter where they are.

It is ideal both for beginners and for professionals, for Makers, H/W Hackers, Arduino & IoT products.

We just launched our Kickstarter campaign which you can find here if you are interested! Feel free to share the word with your friends and anybody who might be interested in this! :)

Cheers!

Fay

[SteveBaker]

If you're into Arduino or Raspberry Pi and haven't looked at the ESP8266 yet - you should!

I've been playing with the ESP8266 - it's an interesting device.   It's intended use is as a serial-port to WiFi interface.  That makes it great to hook up to an Arduino because you can do WiFi without a gigantic software stack.

But I'm more interested in it because you can write code directly onto it and actually REPLACE the Arduino in a lot of cases.

Firstly, it's crazy-cheap.  Probably the cheapest viable computer money can buy!   They costs about $2.50 in small quantities and maybe under $2 if you buy a bunch of them.  It has a CPU, RAM, Flash and a WiFi interface on a circuit board about the size of your thumbnail - and it runs off of 3.3 volts - so a couple of AAA batteries are all you need.  The WiFi software stack is in ROM - and there is an SDK library to allow you to access it.  (Sadly, NOT OpenSourced - but free-as-in-beer).

If you buy an external FTDI interface for your dev environment, you can flash new programs into it via USB and program it yourself in C (or, I believe, Lua or Basic).  There is an existing tool-chain for Linux that works really well.

The firmware built into the ROM is a bit unusual though - it magically pages your code out of flash and into RAM in the background and you have to use an "event"-based programming model with no "main loop" in your code.  You have to be careful to leave enough CPU time for the WiFi stuff to do it's thing - but the CPU seems reasonably fast, so that hasn't been a problem for me *yet*.   It's nice that it automatically "sleeps" between events, so the battery life is crazy-long if it's not doing much.

When I was figuring out how this thing works, I made a WiFi doorbell (push-button + ESP8266 + 2xAAA batteries)...it sends a data packet to a server when you press the button - and sleeps when the button isn't pressed.  It's been running for 3 months without needing to replace the battery - I have no idea how long it'll go for.  The most expensive part was the battery box!

There are several available ESP8266 circuit boards - some only have a couple of serial port wires exposed on the connector - others break out all of the signals from the chip.  Some have a WiFi antenna made from a circuit board track - others require an external antenna - which adds about $1 to the price if you buy them in quantity.

Dunno about codebender.esp - but the ESP8266 is a fun toy.

  -- Steve

[Robert Ristroph]

I have used codebender as part of the "Little Hackers" Saturday group
that was meeting here for a while. It is really nice because setting
up a development environment often soaks up more than half of an intro
to arduino class, and it is quick to get going and easy to share code
from the teacher to the group.

I think we should select one of the ESP8266 boards that is most
versitile (breaks out the most pins) and stock it in the vending
machine.

--Rob

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[Steve Baker]

I agree that having a friendly IDE is good for beginners.

However, I'm a dyed-in-the-wool Linux command line person - so give me
"vi", "make" and "g++" and I'm a happy camper! I dislike having to learn
a new IDE for each different language/system that I use.

My ESP dev setup is a laser cut box containing an FTDI board, two AAA
batteries and a three position switch ("Run"/"Off"/"Flash") - which hooks
up to my desktop machine via USB and to the ESP8266 board via a short
10-way ribbon cable.

I edit C++ code in "vi", type "make" to compile/link/flash it onto the ESP
board. Couldn't be easier (for me) and the entire tool chain is
OpenSourced except for the ESP SDK that has the low level WiFi functions
and a few other bits of magic like setting timers and putting the chip to
sleep.

Debugging is a bit more painful - but the FTDI gives me a USB serial
connection so "console /dev/ttyUSB0" is enough to get a "printf"
stream...and once I got the TCP WiFi code going, I had the ESP chip host a
simple diagnostic web page so I could monitor what it was doing from a
browser.

Most of the big chunks of code can be built and debugged in a test-harness
on Linux - so it's really only the low level integration that has to be
debugged on-device.

-- Steve

>>> I’d like to share our news with you!
>>>
>>>
>>> We’ve created codebender:esp an easy-to-use professional Cloud IDE

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-- Steve

[Riley]

There is an OTA module which allows the esp-8266 to be flashed via wifi.

First flash of course requires TTL serial, but unless a sketch really really bjorks things up any future updates can be pushed via the IDE or auto-pulled from github, FTP or whatnot.

One of the most breadboard friendly modules is the esp-8266-201 as seen here

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10208415334608445&id=1458409759

Arvon of the Linux group created this basic hookup guide as well as one for i2c devices like the OLED display he was using. i2c 8 bit I/O expander chips like PFC8574P are less than a dollar on eBay.

I tweaked the guide resistor values a bit and included info for connecting an SD card.

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10208488333913382&id=1458409759

Jerry Rutherford of the robot group got started with these and he went nuts! In just a few days he was developing AJAX svg gauges, animation and video streaming modules for the webserver examples. We went to an 8266 workshop down at the Chicon collective which used ESP on an uno sized board to order dominos pizza via tweeting!

I have a pretty good selection of 8266 modules on hand, I'll see about coordinating with Rob to stock the vending machine.

-
Riley

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[Riley]

I should have said OTA update driver.   So far as I know all the various modules can use it, not just the 201.

But apparently they mentioned that in the original blurb. Guess I skimmed through that as kickstarter spam. Duh@me

$50k for adding another target to an existing cloud compiler? Really??? After opensource folks did all the hard work???

Oy.... shutting up now

[SteveBaker]

If you want their OTA service - they charge $60 for 20 devices for a year or $120 for 50 devices for a year - which means that you're paying $2 per device per year!  That's a LOT, considering that each device probably only cost $2.50 to start with!

[Riley]

Oh that's just pure BS.

The Arduino & opensource OTA methods are free, work great.

-
Riley









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