3 Simple ways of programming an ESP-12 Module

I'm prototype in a project you're probably going to use an ESP development boards such as a Wii most e1 mini or an old MCU these boards can be programmed via USB but if you're designing a product you might want to include one of these ESP 12 modules instead because they're much smaller in this video we're going to take a look at three different ways that we can program the ESP 12 module the easiest way to program an ESP 12 module is to use a board like this where you can just pop the module into place and then program it like you would any other ESP development board the downsides of something like this is that you can only program before you place the module into your project and also it's a little bit expensive if you're doing only a couple of modules it's really if you want to do a lot of them I got my board from Aliexpress but I believe the original designer was this user Fred on tindy he was sold out at the time but I linked to both of them in the description below the next option we're gonna look at is manually putting it into programming mode and programming it with basically any USB to serial adapter even this one that's less than 50 cent works first we need to look at how the module is set up for normal operation reset and chip PD or chip enable are pulled high so is GPIO pin 0 and then GPIO pin 15 is pulled low to enable programming mode GPIO pin 0 must be low when the board resets the easiest way to do this is add two momentary buttons that will pull GPIO 0 to ground and reset to ground then you would just hold the GPIO 0 button down and press the reset and then you can let go of all buttons I've seen a lot of mention online about doing this sequence at a specific parrot when the arduino ide is uploading but you don't need to worry about that at all once you enable boot mode it will stay there until the next reset so just perform at any time before they upload and finally to connect up the programmer you need to connect the TX and rx to the opposite pins on the ESP also most of the programmers don't have a strong enough power supply to power the ESP but you'll need to comment out the ground so connect ground to ground but power the ESP externally but what if we want something that enables programming mode dramatically it's possible to do it with some of the usb-to-serial breakouts such as this FTDI board with some external circuitry but I think there's a better way of doing it you can use a device that can power the ESP can program the ESP handling the auto reset cost less than 250 dollars delivered and there's even a good chance you already have one so what is this device well it's actually an o1 MCU board and I got the idea from a another youtuber called Mika Kirk Ella and Micah's video he uses the node MCU board to program an ESP 0-1 but we can just use the same idea to program RESP 12 module it's pretty much the same as we had before except our connecting gpio pins 0 to D 3 because that's pin 0 on an old MCU board we connected to reset pins together TX and rx are not swapped around like the word before so TX goes directly to TX and then finally we're connecting the chip enable pin of the node MCU to ground this will disable the ESP on the node MCU board once it's wired up like this you can program the board exactly as you would your node MCU board if you want to make use of this on the boards you're designing just breakout ground GPIO pin 0 VCC of the ESP TX Rx and reset hopefully you found this video interesting if you have any questions or comments or if there's any other programming methods that you'd like to share please let us know in the comments below thanks a lot for watching and I'll catch you next time bye

Channel: Brian Lough

Views: 79,248

Keywords: maker, arduino, electronics, esp8266, programmer, esp12, esp-12

Id: 37KlzYhJaQs

Length: 3min 54sec (234 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 22 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/Pako2]

That's nice. However, I would be afraid if I did not have the option to program the embedded module (that is ISP = In-System Programming). I know this is possible with OTA, but it can fail for a variety of reasons. That's why I always add an ISP connector and I made a programmer for it. You can see it here.