How to Flash WLED to ESP32 & ESP8266 + Troubleshooting Tips

what's up everybody welcome back to bluebot tech i'm zach and today we're going to be kicking off our blue bot bites series of videos now these are going to be small digestible should be less than 10 minute videos uh teaching essentially the basics you know things like how to solder or for instance today we're going to be going over how to flash a node mcu now we're going to be covering both esp8266 to include the d1 mini and esp32s now in a prior video we went over the full startup with wled but we used a piece of software called esp easy now that software isn't readily available anymore unfortunately so you can find it on our github however there are better methods so today specifically we're going to be going over esp tool esp home flasher and then in the end we'll even show you how you can potentially use esp home to flash a node mcu directly from your home assistant instance running wherever you have it running all right i really hope you all enjoy this series we're excited about it let's get started okay to get started with installing and or flashing wled to one of our esp8266 or esp32 we're simply going to need to start out here at the github page for wled that's done by air cookie we'll simply just scroll down here and we're going to want to scroll down to where we see the wiki link and jump over to that now the wiki is great it has a really quick quick start guide and how to and essentially if you follow this you're going to probably end up being successful we wanted to put the video together just in case anybody had questions on some of our upcoming videos this is always going to be nice to refer back to as you can see in the quick start guide they have a couple wiring diagrams for different led strips so whether using you know ws2812s or sk6812s this is kind of what you would follow along with what pins you would use for your data line whether you're using an 8266 versus 32 now the easiest way to get started here is to just click this link here that i just want to use wled this is going to take us over here now the way i generally do all of my flashing is via the the first flashing method here the esp tool as you can see once we get all of that set up air cookie provides the exact commands you're going to need to run to get those bins flashed so let's go ahead and start off with the first step so we'll hop over here to esp tool to get that installed now this takes us to the espressif esp tool github page now you're going to need python so whether you're on windows mac or linux today i'm using windows i figured i'd use windows since that's what most people will use we can hop over to python.org and you would download and then download python also um python is available in the microsoft store so as you can see if we hop over here and search for python you just simply want to download and install the the latest version now python is already installed on my computer so i am good to go so we don't need any of that but obviously if you need python on windows that's how you would do that if you need it on mac or linux of course you can use your favorite package manager on either of those distributions okay so here what i like to do before we get our espressif tool is go ahead and with python we can check which version we're using by doing a python tag v so here we have python394 which we're good to go that's the latest version and what i generally like to do because of managing several different python projects i'll create what's known as a virtual environment now to do that you would just do python tag python3 text m and then d e n v and then you name it whatever you want you could name it the end or this instance we could call it something like wld as you can see i did do so here we see at the bottom i have my wled virtual environment ready to go simply cd into that and then you can list that just so you can see now as you can see i've already downloaded the bins i'll show you where to get those and move those over i just didn't want that to be kind of a slow down point in the video now to activate our virtual environment we'll simply go to scripts and we will type activate now ignore all of this we're about to show you how to get that okay so as you can see just to recap this wled means we are in our active virtual environment we can head over and get those release binaries that i already have we'll head back to our wled install page and we'll simply need to click here at the download latest release binary we pop that open we scroll down we see the latest binary is 0.12.0 and depending on which esp you have you'll simply download the associated bin files so if you have a esp32 you'll need the bootloader.bin plus the esp32.in and if you have an 8266 you'll simply need the 8266.bin we'll go ahead and download those again i already have those downloaded of course you can get those and move them over with the command line or if you're not very comfortable on the command line you can simply download to wherever you download them most likely your downloads folder and then move them over to your wled folder which will be under that user and of course for me it's zaca okay so once we have those we're going to now head back to our command line and let's go ahead and get our um esp8266 plugged in we can start with that one so as you can see here i'm working with a esp32 right here and a d1 mini which is essentially the same thing as a it is an 8266 so i don't have the large format 8266 laying around so that's why i'm using this now with an 8266 you simply plug that in as you can see that power light comes on head back over here and like we saw before on the wled page it's simply we need to copy and paste this so once we copy and paste that we'll take this over to our command line and right click to paste that in and then we will need to add the w led and we need the 8266 stop bin go ahead and hit enter so as you can see it found the serial port and it's going to walk through the steps of connecting to and flashing this esp8266 okay so as you saw we did run into some issues with trying to flash the d1 mini now what this comes down to is i'm not normally set up on a windows machine and essentially what is going on is if we go over here and we check in our device manager what we need this to show up as is one of our com ports now i did go back through and get all this working so i'm gonna go over what i did to get this working now if you see some sort of unknown adapter or unknown device that's a good idea that you may not have the right drivers installed so to get everything working what i did was i went over to the arduino ide page and i downloaded that app and if we pop open the arduino ide and the reason i picked the arduino ide is because they do have ways you can add links here so as you can see in the settings in the properties i added this additional boards manager url and we'll include that again in the description below and click ok we'll go over to tools and boards now this did before say it was a generic arduino board but i switch it over by going here just generic esp board and then i attempted to get some info but then also for the d1 mini i went and got the one mini specific drivers from the wemos page so go ahead and go there and as you can see i downloaded the windows b3.5 driver and now when i plug my d1 mini in as you saw prior it is showing up in the the com port area so we'll go ahead and go back over to our command prompt here and we'll do esp tool dot pi all right underscore flash to 0x0 and then we want our w led 32 the 8266 and we'll hit enter okay so now you can see things are working it found that d1 mini on that com4 port and as you can see it's beginning to flash now we'll let this run through and i'll show you how you would do it on the esp32 it's a little bit different because there are these two buttons on the esp32 that you will have to hold down the the one flash button until it begins uh flashing and then you let go of it that's the only difference and you really shouldn't run into a lot of driver errors with the esp32 because i do believe it has some on-board driver handling okay so as you can see it's that easy and this d1 mini is now set up and should be broadcasting um the wled ap that you can then connect to via your wi-fi so we'll go ahead and unplug that d1 mini and we will plug in our esp32 chord delay flat okay so we'll head back over here into our command prompt and we'll do essentially the same thing but instead of writing that we will write our esp32 bootloader so esp32 bootloader.bin as you can see it's connecting but we're going to have to hold down oh i didn't have to hold anything down that time it just began writing now that our bootloader is done writing we will do the exact same thing but we're going to write it at a hex 10 000 and we'll need our wled esp32.bin we'll go ahead and write that okay and i'm not sure it's doing anything so go ahead and just hold that button okay and as you can see once it starts flashing i'm able to let go of that button so i'm glad i did that just to show that that does in fact work and all right we'll let this finish flashing and we'll be right back okay and now you can see that our esp32 is complete and finished flashing uh it should be doing the exact same thing it should be broadcasting that wled ap which would then allow us to connect to and as you can see uh the esp32 when that little blue light is blinking i don't know if the camera is catching that but there you can see it a little bit when that's blinking that's generally how you know it's now broadcasting that wled ap okay so let's go ahead and hop over i want to show you the second method that does provide a gui instead of all command line and may be easier for some people so we'll scroll down here to the flashing method too esp home flasher we'll pop that open real quick and as you can see this just provides downloads so depending on what flavor of operating system you're using you just download what you need so i'll go ahead and download that windows 64 exe and launch that okay and as you can see what that does is that gives me the esp home flasher gui now if you want and you are interested in you know kind of keeping this wled uh distro around on your computer what we can do is go into our scripts and we could simply pip install esp home flasher okay and as you can see that should have done the same thing so if we list that directory yes we have esp home flasher and if i were to close this and simply type esp home flasher that should go ahead and yep pop open that for me so you potentially would have all the same um driver issues with this so since we fixed them already it should be fixed for this and it is so as we can see our com3 here now if this wasn't showing up we could do a quick refresh and hopefully it would show up from here you would simply browse to wherever you were storing that esp32 bin you would open it and we'd flash the usb so as you can see it's going to connect to the serial port and again we may have to hold down that button yep and then let go and it's connected and it should be flashing now okay and as we can see the esp32 finished just fine here on uh esp home flasher nice and easy and this is generally how i choose to do all of my flashing now i haven't run into any issues with the bootloader issues back and forth with esp home flasher so you know your mileage may vary and that's kind of why i tend to err on the side of caution and just go ahead and use the esp tool now just real quick i wanted to at least make mention of it if we hop over to home assistant which most of you should be using you can install esp home and of course that is installable through the supervisor and you would go up to the add-on store and simply download esp home as you can see i have it installed here and i've just kind of thrown it on the sidebar now what you can do here is you can do over-the-air updates and whatnot but what we would do is take our esp 32 or 8266 plug it into our raspberry pi or whatever is running that vm if you're running a vm you may need to forward those com ports onto it once that would be plugged in i could then go through this setup wizard to go ahead and create a firmware and write it to the device um we won't go over that one today if there is interest definitely leave us comments below and we can go from there and throw up another video real quick otherwise thanks so much i hope this was helpful and i hope you know you don't run into too many issues but if you do i hope those troubleshooting steps certainly help you out as always thanks again we hope to see you in the next one [Music] you

Channel: Blue Bot Tech

Views: 38,693

Keywords: wled, wled tutorial, wled guide, how to use wled, esp8266, esp32, setup wled, ws2812b, neopixels, wled effects, led lights, rgb lighting room, smart home, rgb led strip, rgb lighting, rgb led lights, wled alexa, rgb led strip installation, led light strip, led lights diy colors, wled setup, fastled, how to flash wled, flash ESP32 WLED, ws2812b projects, ws2812b display, ws2812b led strip controller, led lights tutorial, wled home assistant, sk6812, esptool, arduino led, esphome

Id: eoWufGV2fKc

Length: 17min 41sec (1061 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 13 2021