[Intro Music]
CISCO: Hi, I'm Cisco with Acrobotic.
And today we're gonna be talking about how to get started with the ESP8266
development board. We're gonna be using the Arduino IDE
to write custom firmware that is gonna be downloaded onto the board
and execute. The materials that we're gonna need for this tutorial
are the development board itself.
It's optional, but nice to have a solderless breadboard and just a Micro B USB cable.
We've taken the ESP-12E module, mounted it on
our development board, in order to make things even easier.
We include a few additional components like a USB
to Serial UART translator chip by Silicon Labs.
And a few other, like a voltage regulator
a few other components, so that you can just plug it into your computer
use the Arduino IDE and just get started with
developing software or firmware that would run
on the ESP8266 itself.
There are a few different options that you can use for developing firmware that
would run on the ESP8266. And we're gonna be using
today the Arduino IDE, but I wanted to mention the two
more popular ones are using AT commands. This is where you
hook up the ESP8266 to
a micro-controller typically. That micro-controller will send
 these AT commands via serial
aserial UART interface. And again you can read a little bit
more in the links included in the description. But then the ESP8266
device is just listening to AT commands, and
you tell it using an AT sequence "Hey, connect to Wi-Fi"
"this is my SSID, etc. etc.". We are not gonna be using that we
are going to write custom firmware that will get uploaded to the ESP8266
and the ESP8266 is just going to run that custom firmware.
The other one that is really really popular is the Node MCU firmware.
That's a little bit similar to the AT commands.
You can actually use it a few different ways, but for the most part
you end up using the Lua programing language to have this sort of
live interaction with the ESP8266 itself.
You can read more about it again in the links included in the description,
but in order to get started with the Arduino IDE, we're gonna jump to the
Arduino.cc website. And we are gonna go to the download section.
And this is in case you don't have the Arduino IDE already installed.
For those of you who are not familiar, IDE stands for
Integrated Development Environment.
So we are gonna look for the latest version, which is
at the day of this recording 1.6.7.
I'm gonna be using a Mac, so I'm gonna click on the link for Mac OSX.
And then, you know, I encourage you to contribute
to the project, they are really, they are doing really great work.
I'm just for now gonna click just download. And it should take
a few, a couple of minutes to download depending on your internet connection.
The second piece of software that we gonna need
is actually the drivers for talking to the
IEC that is on our development board that does the USB
to Serial UART translation. And for that we're
gonna go to the link from silabs, Silicon Labs
included in the description of this video, and
for me again, I am running this on a Mac. I am running OSX so I'm gonna
scroll down and I'm gonna download the VCP drivers for
Mac OSX. Depending on your operating system, you'll need to download
the corresponding drivers.
Once you've downloaded the VCP drivers from the Silicon Labs website
go ahead and double click on the file. 
Then go to the mounted image and double click on the package file
to go through the installation process. Go ahead and click 'Continue'.
If you want to read the software license agreement, once you
agree with it, then click 'Agree', if you agree.
And then just click on the 'Install'. It'll ask you to enter your password
as you are going through the process. This is again just installing 
the drivers that you'll need in order to 
communicate with the development board.
And it takes a few seconds to install.
At the same time we can go through the process of installing the
Arduino Development Environment. So I'm gonna go back to my downloads
which is where I downloaded the file. I'm gonna go ahead and unzip it.
And that process should take a little bit.
Once the application is unzipped, go ahead and drag it to your
Applications folder.
I had a previous installation. I'm just gonna go ahead and replace that one.
Once the VCP drivers are installed, you are pretty much ready to go.
You can go ahead and open the Arduino IDE.
Then we want to go through the file menu for Windows users
and through the Preferences menu for Mac users.
There's gonna be an 'Additional Boards Manager URL's' entry.
Go ahead and enter the URL included in the description of this video.
And if you already have URLs in there
then just go ahead and add a comma and a space, before adding
the one for the ESP8266 family of boards.
You click OK. The reason we did that is in order to
have the board recognized automatically
by the IDE without installing anything additional.
Then we can go through the 'Tools' menu. Go to Boards and 'Boards Manager'
We wanna search for ESP8266. Click on the entry and click on 'Install'.
It'll download a few things and install a few others, so it'll take some time.
Once that's completed we want to
close down the Arduino App, or the Arduino IDE App
and restart it.
Once all of this is done, you can go ahead and connect your
development board, your ESP8266 development board to the USB
port of your computer.
From the 'Tools' menu, we are going to select Board
and the Node MCU 1.0 entry.
And for the port we're going to select,
for Mac, it looks like the one I'm showing on screen is
forward slash dev, forward slash cu dot SLAB for Silicon Labs
USB to UART. On Windows it would be COM and a number.
So you just go ahead and select the entry
and then finally we can go through the file menu.
Examples, Basics, and we're gonna open the program 'Blink'.
Then we're gonna make a few modifications so that it works
with the ESP8266 board. Instead of the number 13
for the pin that we're going to be using, we're gonna be
changing it to pin number 16.
Then we can go ahead and click the 'Upload' button.
And your board should start blinking, once the program is uploaded
to the ESP8266.
So that's it. You are ready to get started writing your own firmware
to the ESP8266. Thank you for watching.
