Setting up my ESP8266
Published the 2022-01-14

I dug out my ESP8266 after a long time, because I wanted to do a few electronic toys.
Thing is, I've always found the Lua docs to be abyssimally bad.

Lucky me, a friend of mine recommended that I check out micropython, instead of trying to fiddle with a language I'm uncomfortable with, or worse, a shitty native runtime language (C, C++ for arduino seems better, but it's still C++).

My ESP8266 dev boards are some random chinese low-quality devices that are doing the job fine for me, but not much more.
One thing they lack is documentation.

I don't know the specifics of this board's capabilities, notably because I completely lost the original product ID / page, but [the 1m esp8266 build of the MicroPython firmware](https://micropython.org/download/esp8266-1m/) works well for me.

I used [the python `esptool` package](https://pypi.org/project/esptool/) to wipe and flash the boards' firmwares, but I needed a few tries because:

- my user needs to be in the `uucp` group to properly communicate without rights restrictions
- a linux kernel update seems to break new serial devices
- the Orca screen reader software seems to load a tty management kernel module (`brlttl`), which breaks new serial links for me

Once those issues were cleared up (for the Orca part, I simply uninstalled the software, as I didn't manage to set it up before that, so it was still useless to me), I managed to properly wipe the board, and then flash the firmware on it.

```
$ python -m esptool --port /dev/ttyUSB0 erase_flash
$ python -m esptool --port /dev/ttyUSB0 --baud 460800 write_flash --flash_size=detect 0 Downloads/esp8266-1m-20210902-v1.17.bin
```