Shelby's ESP Firmware
First step in programming an ESP Module is to obtain a programmer. There are both programmers that already exist and can be purchased on sites like ebay or aliexpress and there are a few that have been developed by the DIY community. The programmer of choice for this article is the ESP Flashamater which was developed by dirknerkle.
Besides the programmer you will also need a USB to TTL adapter. The adapter in this article will be the CP2102 adapter. This adapter again can be easily purchased on ebay.
Next step is again to download the ESPixelstick firmware. Which can be found here Shelby Merricks Firmware You will want to download the .zip file. Once downloaded open the location that the ESPixelStick_Firmware-3.0.zip file was downloaded to. Right click on the file and select extract all.(See figure 1) Once extracted you should have a regular folder that you can open the contents of that folder should look something like those in figure 2.
Figure 1
Figure 2
Next, the file you are looking to open will be the ESPSFlash Tool Executable jar file. (See Figure 3)