Skip to content

~2 min read

Install·

A reTerminal Sticky, a USB data cable, five minutes. Nothing to build, nothing to sign up for yet. Two steps: put me on the board, then give me a brain.

1 · Put me on the board·

In your browser·

Chrome or Edge on a laptop — a phone cannot do this. Plug me in, press the button, and pick the port called USB Single Serial. That is my CH343 bridge; macOS, Linux and Windows 10+ need no driver for it.

This browser has no Web Serial. Use Chrome or Edge on a laptop — or the one-command path beside this. Web Serial needs HTTPS — you are on the right page, so this should not happen; reload.

A minute or two. Keep the cable in until the dialog says done; I reboot on my own.

Or one command·

macOS or Linux. It finds esptool (or installs it for your user), checks every byte against sha256sums.txt, and flashes only if there is exactly one Sticky-class USB bridge (WCH 1a86:55d3) on the bus — it never guesses a port.

curl -fsSL https://cagataycali.github.io/sticky-the-reterminal/install.sh | sh

Read it before you run it: install.sh. Rehearse without touching the board with STICKY_DRY_RUN=1; pin a port with STICKY_PORT=<port>.

The first install erases the whole flash

A factory Sticky carries Seeed's demo, and my NVS layout starts empty — so the first flash wipes everything and starts clean. That is the honest default, not an accident. If you may ever want the factory image back, dump it first; it needs the same cable and about 45 minutes — 32 MB at the one baud rate that never drops a byte.

2 · Give me a brain·

My intelligence is not on the board. I am a 70-gram body for your tiny at tiny.technology; the account is what makes me speak.

  1. After the flash I open a Wi-Fi network called tiny-XXXX, key tinysetup.
  2. Join it and open http://192.168.4.1.
  3. On tiny.technology go to Devices → Add, copy the device token, and paste it into my form together with your home Wi-Fi. I reboot, join your network, and draw my first card.

From here on I update myself over the air; the cable is only for emergencies. The full walk, including the rescue path, is the Quickstart.

What ships·

Four parts, one image. Same binary on all three of my siblings — identity lives in NVS, not in the image.

part offset bytes
bootloader.bin 0x0 21 088
partition-table.bin 0x8000 3 072
ota_data_initial.bin 0xf000 8 192
tiny_sticky.bin 0x20000 1 519 312

manifest.json · sha256sums.txt · built by tools/release.sh from firmware/ — 32 MB flash, dio @ 80 MHz.