Not so long time ago we reported that XOD is compatible with ESP8266 modules to access internet resources. However, the only way to use ESP8266 was the AT-commands slave mode. You had to use an Arduino as the primary board anyway.

Nonetheless, ESP8266 is a powerful chip which can easily act on its own without any assistance from another MCU. There are boards on the market entirely built around ESP8266; the popular examples are WEMOS and NodeMCU.

The new 0.25.0 release of XOD brings all necessary changes to make it possible for compiling and uploading to ESP8266-based boards natively right from within IDE.

Of course, an ESP8266 board without internet access is weird. So, XOD now carries a new library xod-dev/esp8266-mcu . The nodes inside it are very similar to those available for the AT-mode, but they work with the built-in Wi-Fi. We published a new guide article to get started.

Under the hood

We have replaced the incomplete arduino-builder tool inside XOD with the new and full-featured arduino-cli . Although arduino-cli was released very recently, it already can do more than its predecessor. To be more specific, not only compilations are possible, but uploading and hardware package and toolchains installing.

Having that, XOD now potentially supports any board as the target that you might see in the Arduino IDE’s “Tools → Board” menu. Including a new package is as simple as adding a URL to the package index JSON to $WORKSPACE/__packages__/extra.txt . For example, https://adafruit.github.io/arduino-board-index/package_adafruit_index.json

See Unofficial list of 3rd party boards support urls for more. Note, the official and ESP8266 indexes are included out of the box.