Arduino Esp8266 Board Manager Set Up

For an up and coming project I'm going to be using a esp8266 board, now to use this board you have to add additional boards within the IDE using boards manager and add a json library as well.

To a newcomer to Arduino this might not make a lot of sense initially like it did with me, but it's one of those things when once you have done it it's a real easy process.

Using screenshots for each of the processes this is how I went about setting it up.

To use esp8266 boards like a Wemos D1 or NodeMCU boards, these boards have to be added into the IDE, the only boards available from the get go are Arduino AVR boards, Like the Uno, Nano, Mega etc

To kick this process off we need the correct json file adding in the preferences window.

In the Arduino IDE click on File then preferences, click this and where it says Additional Boards manager URL: type in the json file as it is in the in the screen shot.

Looking at the screen shots you will see the json file and where you input the text in the preferences window, when I try to add it here it turns the text blue and into a hyperlink which is not what we want.

With this part of the process done we can now move onto the next part.

Opening the Tools Tab, where it says Board "Arduino Yun" Highlighting this and looking to the right of this shows the AVR boards, above this it says Boards Manager.. click on this and this opens up the Boards manager Interface, it sometimes takes time to add the platforms.

Looking along the top part of this Type should be All and to the right of this is the filter search box where you will type in esp this will bring up the esp8266 community platform, clicking on Install will load the latest version, you can update and uninstall from here as well if you ever need to.

So with this part done we can now go back to the Ide and clicking on the Tools tab, Hovering the mouse over the Board "Arduino Yun" you will now see not only the Arduino AVR boards but below this there are now all the esp8266 boards listed.

For the Chinese clone Wemos D1 boards its usually the Lolin(Wemos)D1 R2 & Mini which is the only board I've really used with the NTP Time Word clocks etc.

If it was the Wemos D1 you were using in a sketch then click on that, there is a lot of text with the Wemos but we don't need to change anything apart from clicking on the Port with a Micro USB Cable plugged in of course:)

From here on you should be able to compile your sketch and then upload.

That's about it for this Instructable, not much to it but when I was starting out with Arduino it was all a bit confusing, a lot of it still is if I'm honest, its a learning curve as it is with everything.

Thanks for looking.