The open source ESP8266 esptool that’s part of the esp-open-sdk is used as a tool to create a firmware image from elf image/binary. It is also used to flash/program an ESP8266 with this firmware image. In addition you can do the opposite, download a firmware image.

ESP8266 is a wonderful little piece of hardware I stumbled over some months ago. It has gotten a lot of attention since some time back in 2014. Mainly because it is an incredible cheap WiFi module (less than $2 these days). It’s not until recently I’ve had some time to actually look into it. Personally I like to know how things work from bottom up, so that means digging down into electronics and the firmware/software you can either use out of the box or build/construct yourself for ESP8266.

You might wonder; What’s Radare or Radare2? Well, head over to rada.re/radare.org and check it out. Basically it is a reverse engineering tool for static software anlysis. You can also use it for debugging I guess, but my main use of it will be reverse engineering binary blobs by disassembling machine code to understand how it works.

It’s weird. A year ago or so I thought using wordpress would be easy and simple enough to actually write something quite often. It turns out I was wrong. First of all I don’t like wordpress for it’s technology. It’s PHP! :P And uses a database (MySQL). Second, it is pain to use. Log in, use a WYSIWYG editor and publish through the browser. Changing wordpress, extending or touching it apart from installing plugins seems tedious and waste of time. Even just hunting for the proper plugins is waste of time if you ask me. So…