Upload speed Arduino vs serial programmer

@davee Hi Dave, thanks for your response. Surely you have determined from my topics that I am not an accomplished programmer. I am an old-fashioned electronics engineer with knowledge of radio and television technology. I like tinkering with microprocessors and it doesn't take up much space. It was an accidental discovery that programming via the Arduino is much faster than via a serial programmer.
 

@douwebakker Ok, got it. I used my FTDI232 programmer that has a 5/3.3 switch and 6 pins exposed to jump GPIO0 to G and got it programmed, then I stuck the ESP01 card into the carrier board as seen in the video. Blink is running! Now why was I doing this? Oh yes, upload speed. I already posted the speeds at https://forum.dronebotworkshop.com/postid/35276/ and no need for a UNO.

Hi @douwebakker,

  Many discoveries .. perhaps most ... are the result of someone doing something 'ordinary' and noticing something 'unexpected'.

What follows is more important ... it is often necessary to carefully isolate the reason for the discovery from lots of spurious other things that are going on at the same time, otherwise it just becomes an excepted oddity of no real value.

Hence, my plea for some precise details in the hope of learning something that can be developed further. 

------------

I too remember getting a pretty fair understanding of the circuits of radio and TV, including colour which was then becoming mainstream in the UK, before I even came "face-to-punched card" with a computer! Since then the two technologies have continued to get closer together,.to the point it feels like the only technology a present day TV shares with its predecessors in the 1960s is the 'Belling-Lee' coax aerial socket design!

Best wishes, Dave

Posted by: @inq

I would say the main reason is even the smallest ESP-01 has 512 KB of flash memory (ESP-01S 1MB). Most other ESP8266 have 4 or 16MB. An UNO only has 32 KB. It simply takes time to erase flash memory before the writing process. Size of program doesn't really come into it.

However, even the blink sketch will have the WiFi low level code in it from Espressif, no matter whether your using WiFi or not. You'll note the binary is a lot larger than the Uno version.

Are you using the best upload speed for the ESP? I always use: 921600. I have seen some computer/ESP combinations that can use the 3,000,000 baud rate... at which point is upload even a full-blown WiFi app in short order.

Good morning, thanks for your comment. I'm responding a little later than I should, but that's because I had to think about your statement. But I think it might have something to do with the flash memory. I have no other explanation for it.

Douwe

To make programming the ESP8266-01 a bit easier I made a programming board today.

It works very simple:

1 Press and hold U/N key.
2 Connect USB cable
3 Release U/N key.
4 Start uploading.
5 Press the Res key.

And then the program runs.
 
 

@douwebakker cool hardware design. I don't understand the directions tho. Conceptually it's connect USB, press upload sketch, before it times out press and hold the GPIO0 to G switch. Release, programming is now done. Press the reset switch to run. Thanks for the idea.

@douwebakker I can't see how you get the breadboard pins connected to the header pins. The pieces of perf board I have do not connect adjacent rows or columns. In the past I have had success at just dragging an excess amt of solder from one pin to the other but now it doesn't want to work. Am I missing some other trick?

@zander, Hi Ron,I used double Sided experiment board.

The connections are made with very thin wire.

Then the headers are soldered on.

@douwebakker Ok, I ended up ordering special boards that have same pattern as breadboard plus some others that are usable. Your wiring seems to be overkill, that is why I wanted to build it to see if it works with the fewer wires I plan on. Thanks for the inspiration.

Posted by: @zander

@douwebakker Ok, I ended up ordering special boards that have same pattern as breadboard plus some others that are usable. Your wiring seems to be overkill, that is why I wanted to build it to see if it works with the fewer wires I plan on. Thanks for the inspiration.

Don't forget the 10K pull-up resistor between RST and Vcc.

And of course the 2 tact switches.

@douwebakker No need for a resistor, why do you think it's needed?

Posted by: @zander

@douwebakker No need for a resistor, why do you think it's needed?

The pull-up resistance ensures a more stable operation
 

@douwebakker Ok, can you elaborate, I have never seen that before 

Posted by: @zander

@douwebakker Ok, can you elaborate, I have never seen that before 

I saw it in a book by Dogan Ibrahim & Ahmed Ibrahim "ESP8266 and MICROPYTHON"

edit:

@douwebakker Yes. It's not needed for 'stable' operation, it's needed to put that pin in a High state so that when the reset switch pulls it to ground we can detect the Falling/Low state of the pin.