We have had several posts in the series about the ESP8266 introducing the popular SoC and the development boards that incorporate it. In this post, we will see how to program the ESP8266 with the Arduino IDE.
Undoubtedly, being able to use the Arduino environment and all the tools it enables (IDEs, libraries, documentation…) has been a major part of the success of the ESP8266. A success largely due to the community and, later on, has received partial support from the manufacturer Espressif.
In this post, we will see how to configure the standard Arduino IDE to be able to program the ESP8266 and boards based on this popular SoC, like the common NodeMCU and Wemos. Although we can also use any other compatible IDE like Arduino, Visual Studio Code, or Atom.
This process is only valid for the ESP8266 and not for its “big brother” the ESP32. For the ESP32, the process is in this post How to program ESP32 with Arduino IDE
Install ESP8266 in Arduino IDE
Currently, setting up the Arduino environment to work with ESP8266 development boards is very easy, thanks to the support it has received from the community, which makes it available as a package we can download and add to the board manager.
To be able to program development boards based on the ESP8266, we simply need to configure the package URL so we can add them to the Arduino IDE’s board manager.
To do this, we access the configuration menu and in “Additional Board Manager URLs” we click on the small button on the right.
In the window that appears, we add the following URL.
arduino.esp8266.com/stable/package_esp8266com_index.json
If we had other addresses, we leave each one on a separate line.
Now we enter the board manager in the Arduino IDE.
We search for the package of development boards based on the ESP8266 and install it.
We now have the development boards based on the ESP8266 available to program them with the Arduino IDE. That easy!
