Install the Video Alarm Clock firmware

Straight from this page, over a USB cable. No tools to install.

Before you press it

  1. Plug the board into this computer by its UART port — not the OTG one.
  2. Close anything else holding the serial port: a serial monitor in another window is the usual culprit.
  3. Use Chrome, Edge, or Firefox 151+ on a desktop. Safari and iOS cannot do this at all.

This browser cannot flash a board. It needs Web Serial, which Chrome, Edge and Firefox 151+ have on the desktop, and which Safari and iOS do not have at all.

Open this page in one of those, or install from a terminal instead — firmware/flash.sh does the same job and works everywhere.

This page has to be served over HTTPS. You are seeing this because it was opened from a file or over plain HTTP.

Use the published page.

Your browser will ask which serial port to use. Pick the board, and leave the cable alone until it finishes.

What it writes

The bootloader, the partition table, the OTA selector and the application, merged into one image at offset 0 — the same file flash.sh downloads, from the same release. It takes about half a minute and the board resets into the clock face on its own.

Your alarms, Wi-Fi network, brightness and volume live in a separate part of the flash and are left alone, unless you tick Erase device when it offers.

Afterwards

On the device: gear icon → Wi-Fi, pick your network and type the passphrase. The time sets itself from the network a few seconds later.

You should not need a cable again. The clock updates itself from then on — gear → About → Check for updates.

This firmware is built for ESP32-P4 revision v1.00 through v1.99. A board outside that range is refused before anything is written, and the message names the revision it found.