ESP8266 and the Arduino IDE on macOS

Doesn’t work. Fucking go figure. There’s always something to cause a problem. If you have been following the last few posts I’ve made you would see that I have been working on ESPs all weekend. I finally got a new TTL adapter that works with the ESPs and have been playing with ESPlorer and LUA code. I decided to switch over to the Arduino IDE since there seems to be more support and tutorials for it. Well it won’t connect.

That is what I am greeted with. Well after about an hour of trying different shit I found this tidbit on the Github for Arduino issues: This is because esptool-ck doesn’t work with PL2303 based converters on OS X. Fucking great. Thats what I just bought, so I could flash the chips again. So I fired up Virtual Box and Windows 7, downloaded/installed all the needed Arduino shit and drivers and blah blah. Opened a blank sketch in the IDE, selected the ESP board and hit upload. BAM! Shit worked. Took daaays, but it worked. Fucking Apple. Looks like I’m stuck to a Windows machine no matter what I do. Sad face.

Update: So after flashing via Windows in Arduino IDE and it working I went back to macOS to try again. I changed “ck” to “nodemcu”, which didn’t work at all. So I changed it back, thats when it started working. I still had to do the reset-flash-dance. Ground GPIO02 and reset, once booted release GPIO02 and set it high, or let it float. That should put you in bootloader mode so you can flash via the Arduino IDE. I also noticed that I cannot switch back and form between the IDE and ESPlorer. They don’t play nice together. If I want to switch I have to reflash the ESP firmware. That sucks. Picky ass modules.