MicroPython on ESP8266: Installation Guide

Step by step tutorial how to download and install MicroPython on ESP8266 development board, for example ANAVI Thermometer. The exact steps are available at the following blog article:

[wholefoodrunner]

Thank you! This was a very good tutorial I had no problems following your instructions!

[SerioSeria]

Nice! I have your thermometer and I am glad to see so many cool things we can do with it. :)

Could I develop a firmware for the intergrated wifi and thermometer using micropython instead of C++ used in the original firmware? Or is it just for running scripts and in-line commands and getting output via terminal?

[matwyder]

Have you ever encountered the "flashing LED" issue? I have no issues installing NodeMCU or binaries compiled with the Arduino toolkit, but had no luck running MicroPython (or CircuitPython) on the 8266. No matter what I do, after writing the flash and rebooting, I get a constant flickering of the blue onbord LED and seemingly gibberish output on the serial interface (it's just junk on all common baud rates, although at 19200 it clearly has some structure, still non-alphanumeric, meaningless garbage).

The modules I got have 4M flash (tested by writing and reading a string at 0x3ffff0), still tried all the MPy images I could find, older and 512k size reduced versions as well, same results with older esptool and a recent v3.3.1. Erasing the flash before writes doesn't make a difference either. Out of ideas, it just drives me crazy. The boards are marked as ESP8266MOD, generic ESP12F units, identified by esptool as ESP8266EX. Any thoughts apart from throwing them away? :)