So what has your experiance with the Oak been?

[Z69]

I had/have high hopes for the Oak, but to date it has been a bit of a fail for me.
I still hope that i can get my Oak to be stable, Stay connected - Download code OTA and retain the code i uploaded.
Up to now i have had very low success rate on all these.

I have now loaded ESPEasy on my Oaks and they have been running without any restart, crash or loss of connectivity for almost a month.
This show me that the hardware is good, but the Oak firmware is way to unstable to be pushed beyond my work bench.

I hope that these issues can be resolved, as i have a few projects that i would like to use Oak on.

[bdevlin]

Same here, I ordered ten for a yard zoning/gardening project. Totally dissapointed with the current progress. OTA worked on two oaks after many many tries. Came back to the project today after 2 months hoping for more success... Oak #3 just will not OTA flash, so much for OTA, back to serial/usb I guess. A plain ESP12e and arduino mino/micro would have been a better set up and I would be done by now. Oh well, the 10 pack pledge wasn't very expensive I guess.

[phord]

I didn't really try the oaks until this weekend.  I've carried them in my bag for several weeks along with a PiNE64 and a couple of Omega Onion boards (yay! it runs linux; boo, it's so very limited).  I finally had time to play with them last weekend.

My dad has a networked Arduino device I wrote some code for in the past. This weekend while I was visiting him we ported that code to the Oak and replaced his $70 Uno+NetworkShield with a $10 Oak and got free WiFi in the bargain.

The port was pretty easy; debugging the Oak and finding my way through the sparse and changing documentation was rough.  I got his new device running ok before I left, but he needs to add level shifters to drive his external device.  If he needs any code updates afterwards, it's nice to know I can updated it OTA even though I'm 350 miles away.  I found out today about the different Board modes, so I already know I'll want to update him to continue to run even when Particle is not reachable.

By the way, that's a good example of the sparse and shifting documentation.  I only found out about this weird boot mode here:
https://digistump.com/board/index.php/topic,2322.msg10871.html#msg10871

Other things I found confusing: 

• Dashboard: Unhelpful landing page tells me how to SAVE my dashboard, but not what a dashboard is.
• OakTerm: Nice! One I realized I should use println instead of variables.
• Bootloader failures: I had lots of "Flashing likely failed" and other errors early on.
• WiFi connection problems: Maybe contributed to my flash failures.
• Particle API: The subset supported by Oak
• ESP8266 Libraries: enticing and dangerous
• Compiler toolchains, binary sizes, Arduino emulation points

This is the first ESP8266 board I've actually booted; I have a couple in a drawer somewhere, and a Huzzah board I've never tried out. 

Overall I'm pretty happy with the Oak.  I think it's way behind schedule, because kickstarter, new baby, dependence on Particle, etc.  But I think it's going in the right direction.

[pippin88]

I had/have high hopes for the Oak, but to date it has been a bit of a fail for me.
I still hope that i can get my Oak to be stable, Stay connected - Download code OTA and retain the code i uploaded.
Up to now i have had very low success rate on all these.

I have now loaded ESPEasy on my Oaks and they have been running without any restart, crash or loss of connectivity for almost a month.
This show me that the hardware is good, but the Oak firmware is way to unstable to be pushed beyond my work bench.

I hope that these issues can be resolved, as i have a few projects that i would like to use Oak on.

Can you give me a breakdown of how you flashed ESPEasy on the Oaks?

I've got it working on an ESP-201 and want to try it on an Oak, but can't work out how.

[Z69]

Hi pippin88

I used the attached adafruit drawing and connected the following items:

1. R1, R4, R6 and R7
2. SW1 - "Reset" and SW2 - "Flash"

I used a USB to RS232 3.3V convertor, please make sure it is 3.3V, ESP8266 is not 5V tolerant.
To program, use the tool that come with ESPEasy via the USB RS232 serial convertor that is connected to RX and TX on the Oak
To get into "Flash mode" - 1st press Reset and hold, then press Flash and hold both. Now release "Reset" and then "Flash", you can now upload ESPEasy via serial.

At the moment the latest Rev. is 120 and it is insanely easy, just do the RTFM here - http://www.esp8266.nu/index.php/ESPEasy

[Nevyn]

I'm finding that OTA can be problematic, in fact I have abandoned using it and program he board using a 3.3V FTDI cable.  Programming the board either OTA or via serial takes about 30 seconds so to have it fail and then have to retry gets infuriating especially when experimenting (read compile, deploy, test, scratch head, rinse and repeat).  As a result I have to use a process I know works every time.

I'm using the 1.0.2 firmware at the moment for no reason than I have not got around to upgrading to the latest.

For a development environment I'm using Visual Studio with the Visual Micro add-in (www.visualmicro.com).  Great set of tools, beats the Arduino IDE every time.

Platform is stable and resilient.  It has survived having sensors added and removed from the environment on many occasions.  I'll be testing it in anger later this year when the weather station I'm building gets it's external housing and starts to live in the garden.

Regards,
Mark

[touliloup]

I have one OAK setup to start every 5 minutes, read 2 temperature and 1 humidity value, send it to thingspeak and go in deepsleep.

The board have been running like that for several month without any problem. The ability to disconnect the power led and to setup wake up pin is very convenient.

However I started to use simple Wemos D1 Mini again as they are just more convenient to flash, I can use serial output for debugging and they are much cheaper (a few dollar and especially free delivery). Also the wifi setup and the Oak is really not convenient. With the standard ESP, an AP is activated and an embedded webpage allow to enter the wifi setup.
Also the particle framework didn't bring as much as I expected...

[PeterF]

Have you seen the Witty ESP8266 boards touliloup? They look really nice as they also have a more modular design allowing you to completely disconnect the USB section. You get a LDR and RGB led pre-attached as a bonus (or hindrance, depending on your project, I suppose!). The Wemos D1 Mini does look nice also though!

I do have to admit having to use an externally accessed web page to configure is a bit annoying, since the Oak still sets up it's own AP, but you then need to configure with another device that has to first have internet access to do the particle login, and then switch to the Oaks AP to finish it. Especially as you shouldn't really need to after the initial install. Would have been much nicer to be able to have the file served by the Oak, and just be mean and make you put in your Particle Access token or something to provision it, making it a bit more self-contained.

I do serial debugging with the Oak, but I do agree it looks to be much easier with the Wemos, and should also be with the Witty, due to the onboard/plugin USB-to-serial chip. I made an adapter that my Oaks plug into in order to debug them or do serial updates. Since I'm starting use the extended stackable female headers for the Oaks, I can plug them into a breadboard AND still have a female header on the top to connect to, or plug them into the programmer, and also plug that into a breadboard if I want. Then I just connect a loose serial adaptor to the end three connectors, or plug one into the female header on the end.

All in all, the Oak has been the best ESP8266 experience I have had to date, in reliability and flexibility, but there are certainly some other options out there