ESP8266 Recovery from a GNU/Linux Distribution

Introduction

I made a mistake while I was playing with my MOD-WIFI-ESP8266-DEV and I messed its memory. I had to recover it by flashing firmware with AT commands.

There are plenty of tutorials about ESP8266 recovery using tools for Microsoft Windows but actually it is much easier to do it from GNU/Linux distribution. This tutorial describes what I did on Ubuntu 15.04 to flash firmware with AT command on ESP8266. Soon after recovering I flashed another firmware with MQTT support to my ESP8266.

Recovery

Follow the steps below to recover ESP8266 firmware on Ubuntu or another GNU/Linux distribution (btw I guess that the process should be similar on MAC OS X):

• Install esptool.py as explained at esp8266-wiki.
• Deploy ESP8266 on a breadboard and connect it to your computer using USB to serial cable, for example USB-Serial-Cable-F.
• Connect GPIO0 to ground.
• Turn on ESP8266.
• Click here to download the firmware on your computer.
• Make sure that ESP8266 is recognized on your computer on port /dev/ttyUSB0 and execute the following command to flash the firmware on ESP8266:

  sudo esptool.py -p /dev/ttyUSB0 write_flash 0x000000 v0.9.2.2\ AT\ Firmware.bin

• If everything is OK the firmware of your ESP8266 will be recovered in less than a minute :)

See Also