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ESP8266 & MicroPython SDK Virtual Machine

Vagrant file to build a virtual machine that can compile the ESP8266 open SDK & MicroPython firmware.

Note that MicroPython support for the ESP8266 is in early stages and does not support the full capabilities of other MicroPython boards. However this VM will help make it easy to build and install MicroPython for the ESP8266 to test it out and even contribute to it.

Many thanks to the contributors of ESP open SDK & MicroPython for making their excellent software available!

Dependencies

You must have the following software installed:

Usage

Clone this repository and navigate to it in a command terminal, then run the following command to bring the Vagrant virtual machine up and provision it for compiling the tools:

vagrant up

After the virtual machine is brought up and provisioned use the following command to enter an SSH session on it:

vagrant ssh

Once inside the virtual machine you will see two git repositories that have already been cloned:

  • esp-open-sdk - This is an SDK to compile code for the ESP8266's processor.

  • micropython - This is the MicroPython SDK which allows running embedded Python code on an ESP8266.

ESP Open SDK

The ESP Open SDK was compiled during the provisioning of the Vagrant box. If you need to recompile it, execute the following commands:

cd ~/esp-open-sdk
make STANDALONE=y

Note that if the compilation fails with an error like:

[ERROR]    collect2: error: ld terminated with signal 9 [Killed]
[ERROR]    make[4]: *** [cc1] Error 1
[ERROR]    make[3]: *** [all-gcc] Error 2

This means the virtual machine ran out of memory during the last stages of the compilation process. You can resolve this by bumping up the memory available to the VM by changing this line in the Vagrantfile

# Bump the memory allocated to the VM up to 1 gigabyte as the compilation of
# the esp-open-sdk tools requires more memory to complete.
v.memory = 1024

I found at least 1 gigabyte of memory was required to compile the SDK (and that is the default configuration value). If you change the Vagrantfile you will need to stop and restart the VM (see the Stopping & Starting the VM section further below).

MicroPython

MicroPython has been built during the box provisioning.

If you make any changes to MicroPython, like modifying the ./scripts/main.py file to change the boards's behavior on boot, you can recompile the MicroPython firmware by running these commands again:

cd ~/micropython/esp8266
make

Flashing ESP8266 Firmware

MicroPython was compiled during the provisioning of the virtual machine, but you need to run the final step to prepare the firmware and flash it onto your device.

Any time you make changes to your python code, such as main.py, you will need to run the flash command below.

To flash a new version of your firmware onto your device run the following command:

make PORT=/dev/ttyUSB0 deploy

Stopping & Starting the VM

To stop the VM make sure you've exited from any SSH session on it (run the exit command) and then run this command inside the directory with the Vagrantfile:

vagrant halt

To start the VM and SSH into it again just run:

vagrant up
vagrant ssh

Credits

This Vagrant project extends the Adafruit ESP8266 MicroPython Vagrant project. Tony DiCola's work made it very easy for me to add the extra steps to fully automate all the build steps when provisioning a new VM.