Hardware Setup

This page describes the hardware setup for the tallies. How to build the tallies and how to build and flash new firmware to the tallies.

Build a Tally

For the tallies a classic RGB ledstrip is used instead of the more modern WS2812B standard. This ledstrip is connected as follows:

Build the firmware

In order to build the firmware a Toolchain for cross compilation is required. This toolchain is provided in the repository in nodemcu-firmware/. To build the code for the tallies, navigate to wifi-tally/tally/ and run make.

$ make
# if it compiles it is syntactically valid
../../nodemcu-firmware/luac.cross -o /dev/null src/init.lua
"busted"
●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●
91 successes / 0 failures / 0 errors / 0 pending : 0.23373 seconds

The resulting files are in the out/ folder.

Flash the firmware

To flash the firmware, first put the device in flash mode. You can do this by pressing and hodling the FLASH button and presing the RST button. After that you can release the FLASH button. Next, navigate to ../wifi-tally/firmware and run install_firmware.sh.

$ ./install_firmware.sh
esptool.py v4.4
Serial port /dev/ttyUSB0
Connecting....
Detecting chip type... Unsupported detection protocol, switching and trying again...
Connecting....
Detecting chip type... ESP8266
Chip is ESP8266EX
Features: WiFi
Crystal is 26MHz
MAC: 50:02:91:fd:ca:0a
Uploading stub...
Running stub...
Stub running...
Configuring flash size...
Flash will be erased from 0x00000000 to 0x00070fff...
Flash params set to 0x0020
Compressed 462848 bytes to 301339...
Wrote 462848 bytes (301339 compressed) at 0x00000000 in 26.7 seconds (effective 138.9 kbit/s)...
Hash of data verified.

Leaving...

Note

If you receive an error about permissions, run sudo -E ./install_firmware.sh to mitigate permissions for the USB device. Also look in the troubleshooting section if you keep having issues.

Flash the Application

Navigate to wifi-tally/tally and run install_application.sh.

Note

Make sure to edit the out/tally-settings.ini for the correct wifi SSID and password.

$ ./install_application.sh
opening port /dev/ttyUSB0 with 115200 baud
Preparing esp for transfer.
Transferring out/my-app.lc as out/my-app.lc
Transferring out/my-led.lc as out/my-led.lc
Transferring out/my-log-buffer.lc as out/my-log-buffer.lc
Transferring out/my-log.lc as out/my-log.lc
Transferring out/my-settings.lc as out/my-settings.lc
Transferring out/my-tally.lc as out/my-tally.lc
Transferring out/my-wifi.lc as out/my-wifi.lc
Transferring out/tally-settings.ini as out/tally-settings.ini
All done!

The tally is ready!