Arduino IDE Configuration v7

Arduino / ESP8266 / ESP32, Software Development / By / December 30, 2023

Installing the Arduino IDE

There are many (nah… many millions of) hits for Arduino installation tutorials. This post is meant to be concise and assumes you have used installation software on your computer. It provides the links and the steps to install the Arduino IDE, add ESP8266 support, and finally to add InqPortal support. I hope you find this post useful.

  1. Download the Arduino installer for your operating system from the Arduino website https://www.arduino.cc/en/software. The rest of this guide will reflect Windows 10. Linux and MacOS will be similar.
  1. Install the Arduino IDE by your operating system’s standard way. Typically, this is simply running from the download prompt in your browser of choice or double clicking of the downloaded file in your file explorer.
  2. Follow all the prompts of the installer.
  3. At this point you can build projects on Arduino and clone boards, but there is more…

ESP8266 Development

  1. Start the Arduino IDE and open the Preferences option under the File menu. You’ll want to point it to a folder where you want to keep your program files and libraries and also add the following line to the Additional boards manager URLs:  http://arduino.esp8266.com/stable/package_esp8266com_index.json
  1. Exit out of that Preferences dialog and then:
    1. Select the Boards Manager button
    2. Restrict the list by typing in ESP8266
    3. Find the library and press the Install button
  1. Plug in your USB connected ESP8266 device.  I use various boards including NodeMCU, WeMos, ESP-07 and ESP-01S via USB Programmers.
  2. Linux and MacOS tend to recognize and install the proper drivers; however, Windows tends to require manual loading of drivers for some ESP8266 boards. Open the Windows Device Manager
  3. If you see one of the following, you already have the proper drivers installed and are ready.
The two most common driver types used with ESP8266 based MPUs
  1. If you see the following yellow triangle with a generic USB2.0-Serial label, you’ll need to add a driver. More details and a driver for your operating system is available at: https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/how-to-install-ch340-drivers/all
This driver won’t work
  1. It will look like this afterwards with USB-SERIAL CH340 (COMx).
  1. At this point you will be able to start development on ESP8266 based boards, but there is more…

ESP8266 Web and IoT Development Using InqPortal

  1. To create ESP8266 projects that will have a browser based client GUI connected to your ESP8266 web server, we need the InqPortal library. 
  2. To download the latest InqPortal library,
    1. Open the Arduino Library Manager
    2. Filter the available libraries by typing InqPortal
    3. Press the Install button.
  1. Your development environment is now ready for InqPortal based applications. The next step will be to set project settings. There are many available for ESP8266 boards and some, need to be adjusted for InqPortal usage. Head on to Project Settings.

Next: Project Settings

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