One of the disadvantages of having cheap WiFi-capable boards like those based on the ESP32 is that you have to update them. If you have even a few in every room of your house, it can be a pain to pull them out and connect them to a cable for programming. Over the air programming is a great answer, and [Kevin] shows how you can control the update via a simple GUI. You can see a video demonstration of how it works below.
[Kevin] uses a ready-made OTA library to do the work, but creates a GUI configuration and downloader tool. There is a manual step to force the board into the OTA mode, which might be a mild inconvenience, but it improves security since you need physical access to the device to do an update.
The GUI uses Processing’s Python mode and generates for Windows, Linux, or the Mac. Of course, you can do the same job with a command line interface, which might be more daunting for human operators but would be much easier to integrate with an automated system. For example, you might want to update as part of a Makefile.
You do need Java on the workstation to get everything working. We’ve seen ESP32 OTA done before. You can even pull the same stunt with an Arduino.
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