Feather HUZZAH ESP8266 questions Moderators: adafruit_support_bill, adafruit

[pdh]

So I got a Feather HUZZAH ESP8266 yesterday, my first Feather. It's sitting here happily running Blink at the moment -- so far so good. But I have a couple of questions:

1. The first time I uploaded Blink (from the Arduino IDE) it took several minutes; after that, subsequent uploads take maybe 20 seconds. Am I correct to guess that the long first upload was a one-time thing, perhaps due to some flash-burning to enable the Feather to understand the Arduino IDE rather than Lua?

2. The IDE "Board" options for the Feather includes a few items that aren't mentioned in the tutorial, so I left them at default settings: Debug port: "Disabled", Debug level: "None", and IWP Variant: "v2 Prebuilt (MSS=536)". Is that the right thing to do?

And one side note... I had some trouble uploading my first sketch, and it turned out to be because of my micro USB cable. I have two cables here in my office (not sure where either one came from), but I eventually figured out that they're both just power cables, not data cables. (I use both to recharge different little batteries.) When I tried to use them initially, the IDE said there was no COM port, and Windows Device Manager showed no COM port when I had the Feather plugged in. Finally I tried a third micro USB cable that came with a Kindle, and it worked properly -- a new COM port popped up in Device Manager, and the upload worked.

You can't tell a power-only cable from a data cable just by looking at it, so this is kind of a "gotcha" -- maybe this will help someone else if they run into the same problem.

[adafruit_support_mike]

Yeah, we see people get caught by charge-only USB cables every day. There's a plague of them out there, and they're mentioned in most of the troubleshooting FAQs:

https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-fea ... /faq#faq-4

We suggest cutting them in half so you don't get caught by them a second time. They're usually low-quality wire, and not even good for charging.

Depending on the version of the Arduino IDE you're using, the first time you tried to upload code would have taken a long time because the IDE has to compile all the low-level code that makes the ESP8266 work. Version 1.8.5 has added 'core caching', where it saves a copy of the executable file created from all that code, and reuses it the next time you upload. It does save a lot of time.

The default settings in the Tools menu are good, and it's best to leave them as-is until you know a specific reason for changing them.