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I'm looking to directly program an ESP8266 WiFi Module with out using a FTDI (USB-Serial interface) as suggested in this excelent tutorial. The real purpose is to have access to the GPIO ports of the module.

I heard (from this page) that one can use an Arduino UNO as an intermediate interface for burning the bootloader onto an AVR (e.g. ATmega168 or ATmega328). That is, using the ArduinoISP code example in the IDE.

Is it possible to use an Arduino UNO as temporal bridge to program the ESP8266? Can anyone please suggest some tutorial? Thanks

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I can't comment on the other answers, but I wonder if the 16U2 output are safe for the ESP, i.e. 3.3V levels? –  Devrope May 16 at 19:28

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The simplest way is to unplug the ATMega328P from the board (or otherwise disable it) and just use the ATMega16U2 by connecting the ESP8266 to pins 0 and 1 of the Uno. No programming required at all then - the ESP8266 just takes the place of the ATMega328P.

If you really want to "pass it through" the ATMega328P then you will need to make a transparent pipe for the serial data. That would involve nominating two more pins on the Uno to be a new serial connection, and using SoftwareSerial to interface with those pins. Then you have a simple loop which reads from one port and writes to the other, and the same in reverse of course. Make sure you have the baud rates right. I don't know how well SoftwareSerial would perform at the (commonly) 115200 baud the ESP8266 works at.

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