ESP8266 Community Forum

Just wanted to chime in tell everyone my findings on powering the ESP-12 vs ESP-01. It seems to me the ESP-12 is a bit more power hungry than the ESP-01. The ESP-01 I can power no problems via my cheap CP2102 or PL2303 USB to TTL convertors. Everything just works no issues. The ESP-12 on the other hand does strange things. For example it causes the USB to TTL convertor to become disabled in the OS. Some of the symptoms might be: Hard time getting the convertor to be recognized, hard time getting the com port to connect in your terminal program, using lualoader when you node.restart() it may no restart and hang, other weird unexplainable issues.

Finally I threw together a AMS1117 with a Linksys 5V 2A power brick feeding it and 3.3V out (plus necessary caps of course), hooked the 3.3V and grd from it to the ESP-12 as well as grd from usb to ttl to ESP-12 and have had no problems since. Just remember you need to tie the usb to ttl, other power supply, and esp8266 grounds together or other wierd things happen.

If these are not the same things other people are seeing then please chime in and correct me. Constructive criticism is welcome.

PS I am waiting on two more ESP-12's and a couple of adapter boards from electrodragon but needed a board for my current ESP-12's. I came up with the following (please look over the messy job). It has a jumper to tie GPIO0 to grnd for flashing, a power led, and a button for reset.

Very well work mate!!!!

Apart from the rough edges, it doesn't look like a messy job to me.
You might want to replace the male headers with female ones. They make connecting wires or other components much easier.
Also, most people aren't aware of this, but you only need to ground GPIO0 on start up, and not during the whole upload of a new firmware. So, a push button there is much better than a jumper, since you already have one on the reset pin. Check the following video:
https://youtu.be/cOnPWltYtQs?t=2m10s

Good to know on gpio0 and a button. Probably going to leave this one as is though. I didn't have any female headers but got lots of f to f and f to m wires so no biggie. I may go ahead and add a voltage regulator on the empty part of the board to take a 5v input. These are neat little chips to play with but can be finicky if everything isn't right.