Building

This assumes you have the Toolchain set up. Note that compiling to support OTA upgrades is beyond the scope of this tutorial.

Blinky, A Community Example

cd /opt/Espressif
git clone https://github.com/esp8266/source-code-examples.git
cd source-code-examples/blinky
make

You have two built files; firmware/0x00000.bin and firmware/0x40000.bin. That's it! Move on to Uploading to a device, unless you want to try building the examples provided by Espressif.

Compiling Espressif's Examples

Choose one of the examples to build. Either the AT demo, pre-programmed in a lot of devices, or the IoT demo included with the ESP IoT SDK.

The AT Demo

cd /opt/Espressif/ESP8266_SDK
wget -O at_v0.20_14_11_28.zip https://github.com/esp8266/esp8266-wiki/raw/master/sdk/at_v0.20_14_11_28.zip
unzip at_v0.20_14_11_28.zip
cd at_v0.20_on_SDKv0.9.3
mv at/* .
make

This should be enough before Preparing the Firmware Image.

The IoT Demo

cd /opt/Espressif/ESP8266_SDK/IoT_Demo
make

This should be enough before Preparing the Firmware Image.

Preparing the Firmware Image

The following is encoded in app/gen_misc.sh, but we use the crosstool-NG binutils, and the paths are off-by-one, so we show it in full here. We also use esptool rather than genflashbinv6.exe to not require Windows. If you are following the Blinky example, what is described in this section has already been done by make for you, so reading this is optional.

cd .output/eagle/debug/image
esptool -eo eagle.app.v6.out -bo eagle.app.v6.flash.bin -bs .text -bs .data -bs .rodata -bc -ec
xtensa-lx106-elf-objcopy --only-section .irom0.text -O binary eagle.app.v6.out eagle.app.v6.irom0text.bin
cp eagle.app.v6.flash.bin ../../../../../bin/
cp eagle.app.v6.irom0text.bin ../../../../../bin/

Now you have two files in /opt/Espressif/ESP8266_SDK/bin/, one with the application code and data (called ...flash.bin) and one with SDK code (called ...irom0text.bin).

Move on to Uploading to a device.

More Examples

More examples, like Blinky, can be found on GitHub, https://github.com/esp8266/source-code-examples.