But today is the day: I'm firing up an ESP8266 mini.
This ended up being non-trivial.
- A Beginner's Guide to the ESP8266 by Peter P: too long, wanted quick instructions to flash my Wemos D1 Mini with a blink sketch.
- Wemos Wiki: pointed to standard Arduino board support package on github.
- ESP8266 Arduino Github repo: decided to start here. The Arduino IDE is a pain to use, but I wanted to just get to the point of flashing the D1. This did not work for me, and the Arduino IDE took seconds just to open menus! Luckily there was a pointer to a makefile...
- github.com/plerup/makeEspArduino: this one seems to require the IDE was set up. Before I tried it, I decided to Google for an alternative.
- Compiling for the ESP8266 with Arduino and OTA support without the Arduino IDE sounded promising. One that was actively maintained, and the author's own fork that was "easier to use." Actively maintained please.
- github.com/thunderace/Esp8266-Arduino-Makefile
End result: no success while trying to avoid curl | bash. I'll have to resort to that.