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Justplayin

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Joined: 31/01/2014
Location: United States
Posts: 330

Posted: 10:04am 28 Dec 2015

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Has anyone used a ESP8266 as a serial bridge? I have a small project in the works which will have a Micromite in a location which is not directly accessible. Plus, other employees may need to connect to the Micromite to enter data. My idea is to use a ESP8266 and connect to allow access to the Micromite from any PC on the internal network.

I was looking for some serial bridge software to run on the ESP8266 and found two. However, at a glance I believe they both require the AT firmware and my ESP8266 modules are NodeMCU lua firmware. Before I flash them to the AT firmware, has anyone tried ESP-Link or beckdac/ESP8266-transparent-bridge? If so, any advise?

Thanks,
Curtis

I am not a Mad Scientist... It makes me happy inventing new ways to take over the world!!

mmiscool
Newbie

Joined: 05/11/2015
Location: United States
Posts: 12

Posted: 06:52pm 30 Dec 2015

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You can use the esp8266 basic firmware from esp8266basic.com

It can send and receive serial msgs from the module and yo can produce buttons and other gui widgets in the browser.

This is an example that will put up a gui and send a msg to the external micro and then return a web page with the micros response.

[top]
textbox MsgToSendToDevice
button "Send" [SendIt]
wait

[SendIt]
cls
input MsgToSendToDevice varforreturnmsg
html varforreturnmsg
goto [top]

Note that the input command is blocking.

Once the microcontroller receives the ">" character the esp is ready to receive a msg back. The input command is blocking and requires a cr+lf to terminate the response.

You will see what ever was in the response in your browser.

Not too bad for 8 lines of code.

ESP8266 basic can also handle GPIO, i2c, some oled screens and some one wire temperature sensors. Here is a simple program to turn an led connected to a gpio pin 3.

button "ON" [turnOn]
button "OFF" [turnOff]
wait

[turnOn]
io(po,3,1)
wait

[turnOff]
io(po,3,0)
wait

Hopefully this helps a bit. Edited by mmiscool 2016-01-01

Justplayin

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Joined: 31/01/2014
Location: United States
Posts: 330

Posted: 11:54am 31 Dec 2015

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I have not totally ruled out esp8266basic, but I'd rather not work at learning another BASIC at the moment. Plus, I'm not looking for a GUI, I'm more interested in a simple serial data pass through to and from the MicroMite (for now). Although that may change in the future.

I did finally get a transparent serial bridge setup today using ESP-Link. Took me FOREVER to find a set of pre-made bin files. I have not connected it to a MicroMite yet, however I am able to send data back an forth between a serial Tera Term session and a PuTTY network terminal session. A giant step in the right direction.

--Curt

I am not a Mad Scientist... It makes me happy inventing new ways to take over the world!!

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