esp8266-frankenstein
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nekromant
Command-line UI is highly confusing
I flashed frankenstein firmware yesterday and couldn't do anything useful to it, I thought almost no functions are implemented. Only after checking forum thread it turned out something really works. So, let's go over confusing stuff:
- iwconnect doesn't say anything, so it doesn't seem to work. It's nowhere clear that ifconfig should be used after it to check status. So, iwconnect should say "ok" or "fail" (detailed error message, of course).
- It's nowhere clear that changes done by iwconnect/iwmode may not be applied immediately, but require reset. Again, it should say when it's the case.
- Nowhere clear that spi_dump requires decimal numbers. Passed decent hex values (0x100, etc), it again doesn't say anything, even error (proper fix is to support hex numbers here, but error checking/reporting should happen everywhere).
I know. So far I'm just playing with their weird API making sense of the minefield ahead. This is to be expected, it's not even alpha. The commands are just the underlying API exposed to experiments mostly.
iwconnect starts the connection process. always. No reboot is necessary. iwmode applies immediatly. no reboots necessary. spi_dump is currently a quick hack for debugging.
I'm now trying to get things work with proper newlib instead of a blob, and will be pushing a set of changes sometime next week. For now I want to set default .text location to irom0.text, instead of RAM, IROM_FLASH_ATTR is very ugly and make some changes to microrl itself.
Those are annoying and you're free to fix those, while I'm playing with the rest stuff - feel free to submit pull requests. I'll push some trivial fixes today that allow to use stuff like scanf from newlib - that should make things easier.
Ok, to continue the topic, that new "poke" thing is confusing too. Last thing I would think that it sends data to a remote host. Can we please have it named just "send"?
