Changing from Oak/Particle to generic ESP8266 code with serial and OTA updates

[exeng]

You have got to be kidding me!.... Grabbed another Oak to de-Particle (since it had failed back to a ready to upload state and was not running the loaded sketch) and just for fun tried to upload the simple LED blink code using Particle. It took about 4 to 5 retires but damn it loaded the sketch. It's just maddening knowing that is probably some stupid but simple bug that is causing it to be unreliable.  Does anyone have a clue?  Erik is probably the best resource but he seems busy with other more profitable things.

UPDATE: Well the successful upload via Particle (after 4 to 5 retries) was just a one time event.  It's back to endless retries with no success, so that's it, time to de-Particle the rest of my Oak's and be done with it.  I'm probably the last one to do this.  I assume most, if not all, Oak owners have already moved on and removed their Oak's from Particle.

[exeng]

Just an update: Converted 4 of 5 built Oaks to non-Particle generic ESP8266s and couldn't be happier.  They are all up and running doing their job as monitors for weather, garage door, and an aggregate OLED display of all their feeds through Thingspeak and control via Blynk.  Gone are the fights and failures with Particle OTA. Now I can focus on developing again. The only reason the 5th one has not been converted is I need a temperature probe to complete a pool temp monitor. My old one bit the dust. Also, have 5 more new Oaks looking for something to do.

If you are still fighting Particle, convert. It's not that hard. Be sure to back up your Oaks and keep a record of the device IDs just in case the Particle stuff is fixed down the road.

exeng

[Rboyer]

Glad to see that the wiki is still active. I'm about to de-Particle my Oaks and get them to be useful. Thanks to all for the guidance - wish me luck!

[PeterF]

Glad to hear you're liking life post Particle... it is sad that things didn't work out with the Particle integration... but not point dwelling over it. I've not regretted moving mine over to the official ESP8266 Arduino core... get all the bells and whistles that come with all the improvements they've made to their core since Erik forked it for the Oak, and their OTA support is such much better now... and if you want to do remote upload you can still do that if you want.

[nirajbhatt7]

Is this still valid in 2020? I bought few oaks in kickstarter struggled at the beginning so they went in a box and now I have found them again and wanted to put them to good use.

[bratoff]

Yep, still valid for the most part.  Once you move away from the broken Particle environment, the Oak is basically just an ESP-12F module plus power supply regulation, and with a quasi-Digispark-compatible pin layout.  The ESP8266 Arduino core now supports Oak directly so you don't need to use the special core here - you just need a 3.3v serial interface to flash code into it.  Have fun!

[SHadowX]

I have converted one of my Oaks to Arduino ESP8266 Core a while back and it worked fine. But now when I reflashed it with Platform.IO and left it off overnight it would not boot anymore and upon inspection it just kept drawing about 500 mA at 3.3 V while cooking itself silly quite in a hurry.

I thought it was just bad luck but when the same happened to two of the other Oaks I was left completely baffled.

The last one was flashed multiple times, restarted and everything worked fine, but as soon as I completely removed it's supply voltage (not using the reset pin to restart it) it went into the same unresponsive power hungry state as the others.

None of them will respond on the serial port, even though I try to start them in serial programming mode by holding P2 to GND and they just sit there trying to crisp themselves with 450 to 800 mA of current at 3.3 V.

Does anyone have an idea if they are salvageable or should I just forget about them, toss them in the bin and get a more mainstream ESP board?