Setting Up the Oak – Flashing LED
The Oak microcontroller is new, Digistump only shipped version 1 firmware a few days ago (20th Match 2016). The hardware I have was shipped sometime in January. So the first thing to do is to upgrade the firmware and then try blinking an LED.
Upgrading the firmware
The Digistump Wiki contains a number of tutorials and troubleshooting guides. First stop the Connecting Your Oak for the First Time page. This shows how the Oak can be connected to your WiFi network and the firmware updated.
The initial over the air firmware update was problematic to say the least. Reading through the Digitsump forums it seems that I am not the only one having a problem with the first update. There are three methods for upgrading the firmware:
- Over the Air using firmware from the internet
- Over the air with a local server
- Serial using pyserial or esptool
I started at the top of the list and slowly worked my way down. In the end the only method that worked for me was the serial update.
Flashing an LED
With the latest version of the firmware installed it is time to test the development environment. What could be simpler than flashing and LED. The on board LED is connected to pin 1 so lets try and use that.
Digistump offer two development environments:
At the time of writing there was a known issue with the Particle development environment which prevented an application being built and flashed successfully. This is an early release and so issues are expected.
This only leaves the Arduino environment, an IDE I really hate.
There are two methods for flashing an application to the Oak using the Arduino environment:
- Over The Air (OTA)
- Serial (requires Python)
Despite the earlier problems with the firmware update I decided to try the OTA method first. DigitStump have provided compehensive instructions in their WiKi on how to achieve this.
Following the example was easy and after only 15 minutes I have the LED on the Oak flashing at 1Hz. Just to prove it was not a fluke I then tried changing the frequency and reflashing the Oak.
Success!
Conclusion
My initial frustration with the firmware update was soon forgotten once I had an application successfully running on the Oak. I am hoping that the issues were caused by the fact I have an early release of the board with the original firmware installed.
Programming is easy enough and can be done over the air which is convenient.
Tags: Electronics, ESP8266, Internet of Things, Software Development
Sunday, March 27th, 2016 at 9:00 am • Electronics, ESP8266, Internet of Things, Software Development • RSS 2.0 feed Both comments and pings are currently closed.
