The ESP8266 is a low-cost microcontroller with inbuilt 802.11 WiFi. This container comes with development tools to help you communicate with your ESP8266 NodeMCU development board.
ESPlorer - Java Graphical IDE
The container needs to be run in privileged mode, to access the host TTY device. As the ESPlorer tool is graphical, a VNC server is started and listens on container port 5901. This must be presented as a host port.
docker run -p 5901 --privileged -t -i nickandrew/esp8266 /bin/bash
Inside the container, start the VNC server like this:
/root/bin/start-container.sh
The start-container.sh script may ask you to set a password for the VNC server.
Start the container as above, then do docker ps to find the host port corresponding to container port 5901.
docker ps
CONTAINER ID IMAGE COMMAND CREATED STATUS PORTS NAMES
0b52e1de648f esp8266 "/bin/bash" 25 minutes ago Up 25 minutes 0.0.0.0:32775->5901/tcp lonely_archimedes
From a regular user, do vncviewer 0.0.0.0:32775 (or corresponding port number). Vncviewer will ask for a password, and use the same password you set above.
The vncviewer window should display an Xterm. Inside the xterm, do java -jar /opt/ESPlorer/ESPlorer.jar and ESPlorer will run and maximise itself within the vncviewer window.
I'm just learning this myself, so your experience may differ from mine. This is how I got ESPlorer talking to my ESP8266 NodeMCU dev board.
The ESP8266 is connected to the host USB, in this case /dev/ttyUSB2. This requires the cp210x module (autoloaded by my Ubuntu 14.04). Note that I have other devices /dev/ttyUSB0 and ttyUSB1 which are different device types and I do not want ESPlorer to interfere with those devices.
Docker privileged mode will expose all /dev/ttyUSB* devices to the docker container.
On the right hand side, I set the device name /dev/ttyUSB2 before doing anything else. I set the following:
Baud rate 115200
Clicking the big Open button opened the device and found the AT firmware. It wasn't necessary to set DTR or RTS to talk to the device.
PORT OPEN 115200
Communication with MCU...
Got answer! AutoDetect firmware...
AT-based firmware detected.
AT+GMR
AT version:0.25.0.0(Jun 5 2015 16:27:16)
SDK version:1.1.1
Ai-Thinker Technology Co. Ltd.
Jun 23 2015 23:23:50
OK
At this point the "AT v0.20" tab showed, and I could click on any of the command buttons to communicate with the device. For example, clicking on "CWMODE? - Get current m..."
AT+CWMODE?
+CWMODE:2
OK
Mode 2 is softAP and my phone shows an open AP named "AI-THINKER_F1F8F6". f1:f8:f6 are the last 3 octets of the WiFI MAC address.
At this point I have no idea why my device has the AT firmware; I thought it was supposed to ship with the NodeMCU firmware loaded. I was expecting to start writing Lua code already :-)