The default firmware for ANAVI Thermometer is available in a free and open source Arduino sketch on GitHub. In a previous update we explained how to build it from source and upload it on ANAVI Thermometer through Arduino IDE. However, this is time consuming and requires a lot of configurations. If you just need to get the latest stable version of firmware, the fastest and easiest way is to download a pre-compiled binary and flash it with esptool. The same approach is valid for ANAVI Gas Detector, ANAVI Light Controller and ANAVI Miracle Controller.
Esptool is a free and open source ESP8266 and ESP32 serial bootloader command-line utility. The source code is available at GitHub under GPLv2 license. It is written in Python therefore it is universal and runs on Microsoft Windows, Mac OS and any GNU/Linux distribution (Ubuntu, Debian, Linux Mint, Fedora, CentOS, OpenSUSE, etc).
Installation
As of today, esptool works fine with Python 2.7 or Python 3. Python 2 has been deprecated since January 1, 2020 therefore it is recommended to use esptool with Python 3.
The easiest way to install the latest stable version of esptool is from pypi via pip. The pre-requirements are to have Python and pip installed. Open a terminal and execute the following command:
pip install esptool
Flashing Firmware
Using write_flash argument esptool flashed pre-compiled binary to devices with ESP8266 or ESP32. Here are the exact steps:
- Download the latest stable binary firmware for ANAVI Thermometer from GitHub
- Connect ANAVI Thermometer to a computer using UART to USB debug cable: RX to TX, TX to RX and GND to GND
- Turn on the device in boot mode. Press and hold the RESET button and plug the power supply
- In a terminal on your computer execute the following command:
esptool.py --port /dev/ttyUSB0 --baud 460800 write_flash --flash_size=detect 0 firmware.bin
Apart from flashing firmware to ESP8266 and ESP32 devices, esptool has a lot of other advanced features which I encourage you to explore. Have a look at the video tutorial and run esptool.py -h to learn more.
Thanks,
Leon