ESP8266 Community Forum

Hi All,

I'm new to this forum and to these modules so please be patient. I'm just trying to get anything, something going and when I power up these modules (I've tried 2 of 10 so far) I could not even see the LED do anything. Then upon closer inspection it appears to light steady but very dimly.

Based on embedded systems experience to me it looks as though the modules I bought actually came with NO firmware loaded at all.

I am connecting to the modules with a USB Serial bridge - and I've verified serial communications with a hardware loopback on the USB UART RX - TX pins. But trying 9600 8N1, 19200 8N1, and 115200 8N1 with the ESP-12E modules I get nothing from them in the terminal.

I've also briefly tried a flashing utility as instructed http://www.instructables.com/id/Intro-E ... re-update/

... but the flasher fails to connect to the module.

Any ideas what to do next are greatly appreciated.

HARDWARE CONFIG:
VCC - 3.3V
GND - 0V
RST - 10K pullup and button to GND
GPIO_0 - 10K Pullup and button to GND
GPIO_13 - 220 Ohm resistor, LED, GND
RX - to TXD from UART bridge
TX - to RXD from UART bridge

OK. No-one else replied but in the interests of those who may follow, I am posting to indicate some progress.

By a series of trials and errors I have managed to at least get a response in the Serial Monitor (Arduino IDE) and separately in PuTTY that looked garbled. Usually when this happens it indicates incorrect BAUD setting. All the normal settings you'd typically use with UARTS did not work:
9600
19200
57600
115200
etc.

I noticed in the Arduino IDE a really bizarre setting for downloading to flash which only came available when I set the board to "Generic ESP8266 Module" as opposed to "ESP-12E", of 74880 bits per second. Now, in any terminal if I am set to that baud/bps setting, and hit the reset on the ESP-12E, I get the following from it:



WTF? What the heck kind of bit rate is 74880?

Now when trying to program the blinky example from Arduino it begins to try downloading to flash but after a bunch of dots appear in the console, it stops and nothing else happens....

Any ideas or prior experience and how to get passed this is gratefully accepted!