I am waiting on the stuff I ordered last week.  The CH340G chips are probably going to take the longest at 3 to 4 weeks.

To start with I updated my virtual machine to keep it current, I downloaded V1.5.0 of the Espressif SDK, and updated the lubuntu inside of the virtual machine.

I spent this week trying to get the chip running as a web server.  On the ESP8266 forum I found about a project called esp-ginx.  It is a web server with a lot of features.  For me it looks like a lot more than I need.  This is good for this design, I can cut away or ignore the features that I won’t be using or needed.

I downloaded the zip from github.  I ran make from the wrong directory and it failed to compile.  Finally realizing I need to run make from the project directory I was able to get it to compile without any errors.  I then uploaded it to my board and it didn’t work.  I was continuously getting fatal exception (0) on the serial port at 74800 baud.  Thinking that my RAM chip might be causing problems, I decided to remove it and try again.  Still no success.

I then tried to load the code into the NodeMCU board that I also use for testing. I got the same results with it.  I re-loaded my code into my board and got it back to working.  After many tries I finally realized tried putting the app folder in my home directory without any of the SDK files and it compiled.  I loaded this to my board with the commands: make clean, make html, make, and make flash.  The virtual machine had crashed and I needed to reboot my whole system before this worked for me.

This has been very frustrating just to find out that I didn’t understand the way to set up my files.  After I got the web server up and running, I added an entry to my hosts file on my computer.  I made an entry that pointed to he ip address of the board and associated it with smart.relay.com.