A quick guide on flashing WLED to a NodeMCU ESP8266 board

so this is part one in our series on how to control independently addressable leds using a node mcu so the goal of this video is just to get wled running on this esp8266 node mcu chip device thing and we're not going to control leds in this video but we are going to show you how to download all the tools you need in order to get this up and running without touching the command line so for this video all that you need is a node mcu and a usb cable that is capable of delivering data not just power i learned recently that a lot of micro usb cables are actually designed for charging phones or charging bluetooth headsets and things like that but not for delivering data so i had to hunt around and keep trying cables until i found one that worked for me it's this one that came with my xbox so step one is going to be to download the wled firmware from the air cookie github account so i'm going to go over here to the wled github repository and i don't want to download the code because i'm not up for compiling and building and all that stuff we're trying to make this as easy as possible so i'm going to go over to the right where it says releases and if i click on releases then i can go and scroll down until i find the latest release is at the time of this video wled version 0.12.0 so i'm going to scroll down here and i'm going to choose the wled esp8266 dot bin so dot bin is the type of binary file that this esp8266 can handle so the next thing we're going to download is esp easy flasher i like this tool because it is the simplest of all the tools it has the fewest features the fewest options and the fewest decisions to make so i'm gonna also go to their releases and i see serial speed and it's just a zip file so i'm gonna download that zip file so now that both of those are downloaded i am going to open my downloads folder so now in my downloads folder i have that binary file and this flash tool i'm going to right click on that zip file and just say extract all i'm going to choose the defaults and now i have everything i need to copy that binary file to this so what i'm going to do is go back to my downloads folder and drag that binary file into the same folder that's really important on these so now let's open up device manager i'm just going to press start and start searching for device manager and then press enter that's the easiest way to open it and if i go over here to ports i see that i already have a com three and four so i know this is going to get a different port number now you may not have any ports and that's perfectly fine so i'm just going to plug this in and then plug this into my laptop and now device manager automatically refreshes itself and i see that i have a new device on com6 so that means this is running on com6 so let's go back to that folder that we extracted that zip file to and i'm just going to run this flash esp8266 file and i double click on it it says windows protect my pc this is a program it doesn't recognize so i'm just going to click more info and run anyway because i'm dangerous mine already chose com6 but you may need to choose which com port your esp8266 is on and then under firmware it's going to have a drop down menu that shows all of the firmware in that folder remember that's why we copied that file that we downloaded into that folder before running the program so if you don't see anything there make sure to close the program copy that dot bin file into that folder and then it should show up there so i'm going to select that and click flash a little window pops open and it's doing all of the stuff copying everything over to it and now we just wait and there we go flash complete for me on mine i can see it has a little led lit up that's normally not lit up that's something that's in the code of wled is to light that up so i know this is now running wled so there we go if you want to know how to go from this to this then go ahead and subscribe to this channel and i'll be posting the next few steps as small bite size videos like this if you want to play with it and just make sure that it really did work if you go to your wi-fi settings you should see wled ap you can actually connect to that and it will automatically pop open the wled interface so i can see this truly did work and now my laptop is connected to it over wi-fi which is pretty cool

Channel: ChasingSquirrels

Views: 15,128

Keywords: WLED, NodeMCU, HowTo

Id: 7kISG2xw33c

Length: 5min 56sec (356 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 19 2021