ESP8266 Community Forum

- Mon Sep 05, 2016 2:42 am #54495 Hello guys.


Recently I bought ESP8266MOD by vendor called aithinker, soldered it to a breakout board and connected it to the breabord by using Arduino's PS. I was following the tutorial and almost instantly I was able to send TA messages via Serial Monitor.

My setup was defined like this:
ARDUINO ::: ESP8266
3.3v ::: VCC
3.3v ::: CH_PD
GND ::: GND
RX ::: TX
TX ::: RX

Everything was working great, I was able to use all AT commands, and then I decided to move away from RX/TX pins and started using pins 8 and 9. By following some sample codes from the forum, I was able to make it work but got some weird characters while trying to read from SoftwareSerial... In example, I got only half of the text when I call command AT+CWLAP, and sometimes output had some strange characters.

I was using baud rate 115200 for both Serial and my SoftwareSerial initialization. By this time I was starting to use external PS and everything functioned great. I was thinking that might be the thing that is causing the issue and wanted to change baud rate for ESP8266 device to 9600, so I've changed pins again to use on RX/TX, managed to get terminal from ESP8266, played around and changed baudrate, and then I start having issues.

I'm not able to read anything via SoftwareSerial anymore, and I'm also not able to connect via RX/TX pins. When I try to use SerialMonitor and send AT commant I see that RX is blinking once and nothing else, my input is not displayed and I don't get any kind of a feedback from ESP8266. I've tried to read with any baudrate and I'm not getting even gibberish text. Only text that I get is when I disconnect PS from ESP8266 and turn it back on, I get something like this:



I've tried to use putty to connect via arduino to ESP8266, but I got nothing. I get no response with code written for Arduino also. It's not able to communicate with the device and tx light is not blinking from some reason.

I was searching for issues and I found out a bunch of different ones, I've tried about a hundret different step-by-steps (RX/TX, TX/RX, GPIO2 on ESP to VCC, GPIO15 and GPIO00 to Ground..., flashing) but it must be something wrong that I'm doing or something that I'm overlooking.

Just to add, I was searching for answer in already existing topics, but in my case, I see that ESP8266 is connected to my WiFi network and is also acting as AP, and I haven't seen anyone with same problem to have functional client/ap. I'm able to ping it from both networks (the one that it is acting as an AP and the one that he's actually a client). So, I guess that the chip is working but the communication broke at some point, from some reason.

The chip costs about 6$ in my country, and it's not worth of anxiety caused by it, but it really bothers me that I can't figure out what could cause this issue and I wasted about 15 working hours in it. I would be really happy to hear your opinions on this one.


P.S. Only baudrate I couldn't test with is with 76800 because I don't have it listed in Serial Monitor, and by using it in putty I get same result as for any other one.



Best Regards,
Ivan

- Mon Sep 05, 2016 4:33 pm #54566 While I've waited for topic to be approved, I have new additional information. Baud rate 76800 is actually showing something. When I restart the device while connection is attempted to the COM port, I get following info:

Code: Select all ets Jan  8 2013,rst cause:2, boot mode:(3,6)

load 0x40100000, len 1396, room 16
tail 4
chksum 0x89
load 0x3ffe8000, len 776, room 4
tail 4
chksum 0xe8
load 0x3ffe8308, len 540, room 4
tail 8
chksum 0xc0
csum 0xc0

2nd boot version : 1.4(b1)
  SPI Speed      : 40MHz
  SPI Mode       : DIO
  SPI Flash Size & Map: 8Mbit(512KB+512KB)
jump to run user1 @ 1000

do?11?
SDK

I'm now trying to flash the device by using Arduino UNO, but I get constantly messages like:
complete espcomm_send_command: sending command header espcomm_send_command: sending command payload read 0, requested 1
And then seems like there's no response from the device.

- Thu Oct 13, 2016 7:38 pm #56484 Hi, my name is Jon. I'm new to this forum. I own a tactical laser tag business. One of my guns was not able to connect to my arena WiFi router. Obviously the tagger uses the ESP8266MOD from AI THINKER. I replaced this board with another similar board and the tagger works fine. I would still like to know more about this board and possibly other boards in my tagger so I don't have to rely on the manufacturer. I have a video on youtube showing what the tagger's LCD screen said on the WiFi log when trying to initiate connection with the bad ESP8266. If I post the link here would you or anyone be willing to show me how I can salvage this board? Thank you