I messed with ESP8266 devices a lot just over a year ago. Man, did I have fun. I got to where I could get one to log into my local network (LAN), or log in and get out on the internet. I set one up and logged onto it with my laptop, or my iPhone, to access the HTML page. I set two others up to create their own LAN. One broadcast an SSID and waited to display a web page. The other connected to the LAN, accessed the web page and turned on, or off, an LED. I really understood these little devices.

I recently opened up a little box and found the devices inside. I thought I should revisit them. Uh, I had programmed them with the FTDI device with one of my Raspberry Pis. I had updated the Raspbian and didn’t save the old personal files. Bonkers!

I am going to have to learn all over again. I don’t know of a way to use the Arduino IDE to pull the program back out of a chip into a sketch. (It might be possible, I haven’t checked.)

I got out the Sparkfun Thing and the Adafruit Huzzah that used to talk between each other and found the Sketches I had written. Some of the wires were missing so I had to rebuild. The Huzzah is put onto a mini breadboard and has an on/off button and a tactile switch. The Thing has an LED and a resistor. When you turn on the Thing and then the Huzzah, the Huzzah connects to the Thing. You can tell by looking at the Serial window on the Arduino IDE, or by looking at the little blue LED. The little blue LED will flash after the first initialization flash. When you press the button on the Huzzah, the LED on the Thing will light up. Press the Huzzah’s button and the Things’ LED will will go out. I know it is not much, but it was a learning experience for me.

While I was cleaning up things last year I put these things into a box. Uh Oh! They got forgotten. Luckily I was able to find the old Sketches to prick my memory. They are working fine for now.

Where was the documentation? I had written something about them on one of these pages. I didn’t cover much about them. That was my fault. Had I documented them and saved the sketches online I could have helped others learn and helped me from forgetting what I did at the time.

Super Awesome Sylvia reminded me the other day that you should document for sharing and teaching. Now, while it is still fresh in my mind, I have to document and post the code (sketch), what it means, and pictures of the devices and perhaps a schematic.

That is for tomorrow. I still have cleaning up to do. Liverpool FC is playing tonight at 10pm Pacific Coast time. That’s in an hour.

PEACE