A few days ago a package arrived from SeeedStudio: the new NodeMCU board V1.0 (see picture)

You can visit my blog for the complete Windows, Mac OS X and Linux instructions https://randomnerdtutorials.com/how-to-install-esp8266-board-arduino-ide/Op. Installing NodeMCU driver on MAC. The NodeMCU is using USB 2 Serial Communication called CH340, you can download the driver at the link below, you have to install the driver package as you used the NodeMCU on Mac. After you install the CH340 driver you need to test the serial communication by filtering using a bash command see it below. TLDR; install usb driver (CP210x usb-uart), flash NodeMCU firmware, config Arduino IDE for NodeMCU and start hello-world coding. The objective of this short post is to explain how to get the MAC address of the ESP8266. Explaining in detail what is a MAC address is outside of the scope of this post. But, just as a quick explanation, the MAC address is a unique value associated with a network adapter 1. WIFI Kit 32, WIFI LoRa 32, Wireless Stick, Wireless Stick Lite, Wireless Shell — — Based on ESP32 chips, The underlying driver and compilation environment for ESP32 is required; WIFI Kit 8 — — Based on ESP8266 chips, The underlying driver and compilation environment for ESP8266 is required.

The NodeMCU V1.0 (picture from here)

Esp8266 Arduino Mac Driver

On paper it has some nice advantages compared to the old V0.9 version or also to other ESP8266 dev boards: you can directly connect it to your computer for programming and you won’t need an additional USB-to-Serial programmer or an external power supply. The USB connector does the job. The only problem: they must have changed something on the interface. Flashing doesn’t work out of the box anymore:

is what I got when trying to upload a file with the ESPlorer to the module…

I’m programming on a Mac, so all the fancy Windows based flashing tools won’t work for me directly. I usually use the adapted Arduino IDE or the esptool.py to upload new images to the device. This posts describes how you can flash the new hardware despite the problems with the esptool. Basically it shows how you can use the original Windows tool from Espressif from your Mac OS X system, even if it is made for Windows.

Download and install driver for the CP2102 from here: https://www.silabs.com/Support%20Documents/Software/Mac_OSX_VCP_Driver.zip
If you don’t already have it install homebrew: http://brew.sh/
Install wine:
I had to work around some issues with brew and wine. Write a comment if you want to know how I resolved them…
Download the latest Flashing tool from Espressif:
http://bbs.espressif.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=433
Install unrar (if you don’t already have it):
Unpack the flash tool:
Install unrar (if you don’t already have it):
Enter the directory and start the Flashing Tool:
Now that the wine directory has created enter the dosdevices folder and create a symlink to your NodeMCUs tty device:
Select your image and adjust the settings according to this screenshot:
ESP Flash Tool started from wine: adjust the settings accordingly
Now connect the NodeMCU module using USB and press the RST button while you keep pressing the FLASH button. This will put the module into the right state for flashing
Now click START in the flasher tool and wait until it is finished. Click RST again and have fun.

I hope that the esptool gets fixed quickly to work with the new hardware. I’m also not sure whether the problems comes from the USB-to-Serial converter or rather from the ESP-12E module. I suspect it is the later, but I couldn’t find anyone complaining about problems with the ESP-12E in general.

Shopping Links:

From SeeedStudio: http://www.seeedstudio.com/depot/NodeMCU-v2-Lua-based-ESP8266-development-kit-p-2415.html
From AliExpress: Wireless module NodeMcu Lua Nodemcu WIFI Network Development Board Based ESP8266 FZ1390

Esp8266 Mac Driver