I am starting to wonder if there is an issue with the device itself. I have tried every known firmware downloader for the 8266 with still no luck. But what I noticed recently now is at one point I actually got the lua files on the feather, but it would just go into a reboot cycle and never stop. After research this problem it seems to be either a cable or power issue. So I tried 4 different USB cables but I still have the same issue, even after wiping the firmware again with multiple cables. The last flash I did the feather went back into the issue of not allowing the lua files to upload.
I hate to say it but I may just bit the bullet and buy a different board, they are pretty cheap.I do need at least 7-8 zones though. Is there any single board that can handle this many? I would prefer one that already has the pins soldered on the board.
Yes, that NodeMCU v1.0 ESP8266 board has the exact same ESP8266-12e cpu as your Adafruit Feather board. It is the one almost everyone uses without any issue.
Also, to verify whether or not your Feather is bad, why not try loading a simple sketch on it using the Arduino IDE?
Yes, you can handle at least 9 zones with the board you linked above. The only thing you really give up is the battery charging circuit, which I always thought was a great addition by Adafruit. Too bad their board isnāt the most compatible.
The HiLetGo version board sold by Amazon is high quality and is the one I used when developing this application. I donāt think youāll have issues with it. The nice thing about this one is that itās very tiny and fits great on a standard 400-point breadboard. With Amazon Prime you can get it delivered in one day (at least in my area - San Francisco).
Iām a little skeptical that youāll be able to use 9 pins on it though. The pinout diagram does technically show 13 GIPO pins, but I know that many of them serve dual duty with other functions of the board (for example pin D4 also controls the onboard LED), and in my experience Iāve found that many of the pins donāt work well for input, and/or cause the board to not boot correctly when the pins are constantly energized.
I think the easiest/safest thing to do is to buy two of them. Thereās no reason you canāt have two boards running the same code and both posting to SmartThings. With a slightly larger breadboard you can simply pop two on there together. At less than $10 each, itās not a big investment if you have that many sensors to hook up.
Yeah I am going to place an order for the HiLetGo board. Even if I got the feather to work I donāt trust it because of all the issues I have had. If I need two boards its not a big deal, I would rather have two that work without issues then 1 that is problematic.
Edit: Is there certain pins that you would recommend not using with the HiLetGo board?
I also mentioned this in the README somewhere but pins D3, D9 and D10 didnāt work well for me. Pin D4 is shared with the blue onboard LED, so if you want to use that you canāt use it as an input pin (the next release of my program will support blinking the LED on success).
I am finally doing it! Got stuck on the Rest Client. Getting an error. Not sure what I am doing wrong. I verified oath is enabled for smart app and its published.
You might want to make that āoptionalā (via comment) since it takes away a pin. I know Iād rather have an additional sensor than an LED that I would only use to troubleshoot a problem.
I think the LoLin version NodeMCU uses a different USB-UART controller, so you might need different drivers. I think it uses a CH340G USB controller which you can download for mac from here. You can verify this by looking at the component thatās connected to the USB port, itāll probably have CH340 engraved on it (you may need a magnifying glass). Once the driver is installed and itās plugged in you should see something like /dev/cu.wchusbserial.
The HiLetgo version uses the silicon labs driver which shows up as /dev/cu.SLAB_USBtoUART on my mac.
Okay, so I am using ESPloter V0.2.0-rc2. I selected my device /dev/cu.wchusbserial1450 and opened the connection and selected RTS. The screen stated this:
I connected and disconnected again and it went back to the first screen. Donāt know if the files are actually on the unit. And I tried to connect the GRND pin to 6 but the status on SmartThingās is still open.
**UPDATE: I disabled RTS and got it to work (almost). So it tells me when the pin is 1 and 0 when I move them around on the board but the SmartThingās app isnāt updating. It was telling me a few errors for the application when I hit save to ESP but I just hit ok and moved on. How do I fix it? **