ANAVI Thermometer is an open source development board and one of the most important features is the freedom to upload custom firmware, including your own versions. During the weekend I have published a short video tutorial in YouTube how to compile and upload an Arduino sketch to it through Arduino IDE.

The required hardware, apart from ANAVI Thermometer, includes: USB to UART debug cable, USB power supply and a personal computer. You can download the source code for the default firmware of ANAVI Thermometer from GitHub.

Each kit of ANAVI Thermometer includes USB to UART debug cable with CP2102. Depending on the operating system on your personal computer you might need to install additional drives. It should work out of the box on GNU/Linux distributions. Plug the USB in your computer and connect the wires as follows:

Download and install Arduino IDE on your personal computer. It is free and open source software available for MS Windows, Mac OS and GNU/Linux distributions. Launch Arduino IDE and load an Arduino sketch compatible with ANAVI Thermometer.

ANAVI Thermometer is powered by ESP8266 and there are a few configurations that have to be applied in Arduino IDE. Go to File > Preferences. Select Settings and in the field "Additional Boards Manager URLs" add: http://arduino.esp8266.com/stable/package_esp8266com_index.json

From Arduino IDE select Tools > Board: Generic ESP8266 Module. Set the flash size to 4M (1M SPIFFS). The upload speed is 115200. Adjust the exact port of USB to serial debug cable connected to your computer.

Select Tools > Manage Libraries. The Arduino library manager will appear. Install all required libraries and their exact versions. Over the time, with the development of the default firmware, new libraries might be added. Please refer to the README file to get the up to date list of all libraries that must be installed for the default firmware.

In Arudino IDE click Verify/Compile. If there are any errors please double check that you have installed all required libraries and their exact versions. If the source code compiles successfully, please proceed to to the next step for flashing the firmware.

In Arduino IDE click Upload. Press and hold the RESET button on ANAVI Thermometer. Without releasing the RESET button, plug the 5V power supply in the microUSB connector of ANAVI Thermometer. Please do not release the RESET button until the upload has been done. I repeat, please do not release the RESET button until you see in Arduino IDE that the upload is 100% done.

After that you can launch the serial monitor in Arduino IDE and verify that the firmware is successfully running. You can use the same approach for uploading your custom firmware to ANAVI Thermometer.

For more details have a look at video and the user’s manual.

In the mean time, we have also published in GitHub a simple Arduino sketch for connecting to thingspeak.com over MQTT. We will cover the details about thingspeak.com in a separate article. Once again, thank you for support and the help to bring this entirely open source project to life!

Best regards,
Leon