So I recently wrote a chat bot which relies on lua and luasocket to respond to a twitch stream's chat. It's very basic and has various files it reads/writes to. It runs from the local computer. I finally got it working perfectly and now I'm interested in potentially distributing it to streamers who would get the most practical usage out of it.
But I can't just give them the files and lua script; they wouldn't be able to run it. They would need an interpreter and they would need to set up luasocket. With very little experience this is a very daunting task. Even I struggled to properly get luasocket working to make this bot.
So my question: Is there a way to package the lua interpreter and luasocket library such that I can give my bot to other people in an easy to use and practical manner? Preferably a .exe file, but really anything that doesn't require them to go out and set up the entire language and script dependencies on their own.
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I would love to be able to update my NodeMCU ESP8266-01 OTA, since they're located in awkward spots. I'm by no means an expert regarding the ESP or NodeMCU, but I haven't been able to find anything recent about OTA updates. I found some discussions about it going back to 2015, but it never seems to have been implemented.
I use my ESP with NodeMCU to control a PWM dimmer. I upload a precompiled version of NodeMCU with the NodeMCU Firmware FLasher, and then use ESPlorer to upload a custom lua file called 'init.lua'. I'm not even sure if this is the proper way to do stuff, but it works.
So the main question: Has OTA updating been implemented, or is it possible in some way?
Just to clarify, I don't think I want to update the firmware. As I understand it, firmware is what you build yourself, or on a website like https://nodemcu-build.com. I want to update the lua files that run on the ESP, that you normally upload through a program like ESPlorer.
I found some discussions about it going back to 2015, but it never seems to have been implemented.
Indeed, firmware OTA is not available yet. However, as you probably know, the need for firmware OTA is much lower with the NodeMCU firmware than e.g. with the Arduino platform. I'd argue that you're much less likely in need to replace/upgrade/extend the firmware with its built-in modules than the application code that runs on top of it.
Fortunately, it's quite simple to replace one or several Lua scripts (compiled or uncompiled) on the device and reboot it. All the web and cloud IDEs listed at https://frightanic.com/iot/tools-ides-nodemcu/ offer this. There's even a pending PR that'll bring FTP support to NodeMCU.
For a complete Lua provisioning system take a look at what #TerryE provided at https://github.com/nodemcu/nodemcu-firmware/tree/master/lua_examples/luaOTA
I've attempted to use the two Web IDEs listed in the link provided in Marcel Stör's answer, but I honestly failed to understand how to use either IDE. they also seemed like they weren't exactly what I was looking for, and required a server to connect to, or an extra program, which I wanted to avoid.
Edit: Apparently, I did end up using one of the two Web IDEs in the list. Since it's been a while since I did all this, it's a bit fuzzy in my head.
I eventually stumbled upon this GitHub page, which seemed to provide exactly what I was looking for: The ability to access the Lua files on the ESP through a webbrowser. I have personally changed the ide.lua file around completely, since I needed to call functions from it in the init.lua script. However, I think you can just upload the ide.lua script to the ESP, and add a line containing dofile("ide.lua") to your init.lua file.
If anyone is interested in my changes to, or my implementation of the ide.lua script, you can take a look at my repo Timmiej93 / QuinLED / Program code.
In fact there's a class for that to implement OTA i the NodeMCU its called the ESPhttpUpdate you can refer to ESPhttpUpdate for further details.
I'm working with ESP8266 and I don't want to use Lua for the whole project, I just want to run a few snippets of Lua code, received from wifi/sd card. I'd need to start a Lua environment and run the scripts, which would then eventually call some native functions for low level tasks. In other words, I just want to use Lua as simple scripting language (as it's intended to be) to implement some dynamic behavior. Is it possible? Is there any build of lualib for arduino?
Thanks in advance!
You can simply embed Lua in a extlibs/ folder for example and link to it when compiling your program.
There is existing Lua binaries but building it yourself is easy and better (as it's multiplatform).
OK, I know both answers told me I can just embed the code into my project, however, I found out I need to make some small changes. I made an example working project available here and the following list of changes had to be made:
The flags LUA_32BITS and LUA_USE_LONGJMP (C exception handling) were enabled
The following libraries were excluded: io, os, package, coroutine
The following functions were removed from C API: luaL_fileresult, luaL_execresult, luaL_loadfile, luaL_loadfilex, luaL_dofile, luaB_loadfile, luaB_dofile
Lua output messages are redirected to the Serial interface, check tinylua.h, tinylua.cpp and lauxlib.h to change this behavior
Hope this helps!
The ESP8266 has up to 4MB of program storage. Theoretically you can get up to 16MB as the datasheet specifies.
As I remember, compiling an amalgamated version of Lua (all sources in one file), occupies less than 100kb.
So, you can compile the Lua library and use it as needed on esp8266, even using Arduino IDE.
But you will get NAKED Lua if you do so... No nifty libraries to control Wifi, serial, SD, ports... You would have to provide that in C, or use NodeMCU code as you need.
You can try LuaJIT and access C code directly from Lua, cutting out the need for writing libraries. I have no idea of how you would compile it to Esp8266, or if anyone have tried this before, but you can do it "for science" and tell us how it turned out.
I'm trying to use the luafun library with love2d.
Running lua main.lua, however love . complains about the missing fun library.
I have installed luafun with luarocks.
There's two options.
If you want to distribute whatever you're building, you almost certainly don't want users to install Lua, luarocks, etc. etc. - so the best way is to simply put any libraries into the folder that your game/program/… lives in. (If a library contains compiled things, you'll need to build per platform/OS and then you'll actually want a build process that spits out the various variants, but if it's all-Lua, there's no platform-specific stuff, so just copy it in.)
The other option (mostly for when you only need it to work on your machine) is to adjust package.path and then love will find things just fine. If you use LUA_INIT / LUA_PATH on your machine, Love ignores them but you can manually fetch & process them using os.getenv, dofile / load(code)() & friends. (As the very simplest special case of this, if luarocks is installed in the standard Lua search path, saying require "luarocks.loader" might be enough to get all luarocks-installed packages to work.)
Sorry, this is a total Lua-noob question, but from what I have learned about LÖVE so far, it seems that in order to use it, you must run the love executable on a folder/.love file with a main.lua file in the root.
Is it possible, as an alternative, to write an arbitrarily-named Lua script and just require("love") instead, or do you have to start your app with the love executable? (And if so, how?)
You really need to run it with love.exe
It is possible to build love as a shared library so you could, in principle, write an openlib wrapper over it. However, to get it to work in a reasonable fashion as a lua module would need a fair amount of work.
I wouldn't want to put you off doing this if that's of interest to you but it's not really intended to work that way.
I'm trying to learn Lua, but I don't really know which binary to download. There's 2 choices:
Lua Binaries
Lua for Windows
The second option Lua for Windows seems to be the recommended option, but the installer weighs in at 26.6Mb, which is pretty hefty for what is supposed to be a v.lightweight language.
I'm thinking of using Lua as a scripting language for games, and perhaps as a fast development language for file processing like how Python or Ruby does it. So it must be something lightweight, not a 26.6Mb file.
Which is the appropriate one to download and start?
Luaforwindows, no doubt. It's simpler, easier and faster.
The installer comes with lots of stuff (Scite editor & several extra libs if I remember well). But the installer asks you before installing all those extra stuff. Just install the minimum and you will be fine.
Lua for Windows includes a handful of other, useful libraries and tools. The actual Lua executable included is still tiny, in the 1-2MB range as expected.
Having the extras there already will only make things easier, and disk space is cheap: go with Lua for Windows.
You may also want to check ZeroBrane Studio, which is only 4M download on Windows and is based on the same editor as SciTE that comes with Lua for Windows. ZBS also comes with 50+ Lua examples and few simple lessons to get started quickly with Lua programming.
Quoting from here.
Installation
The LuaBinaries files are intended for advanced users and programmers who want to incorporate Lua in their applications or distributions and would like to keep compatibility with LuaBinaries, so they also will be compatible with many other modules available on the Internet.
If what you want is a full Lua installation, please check other projects such as the Lua for Windows and LuaRocks.
Seems quite clear to me that you should download Lua for Windows.