I wired it up to the GPIO pins on the PI per many of the online diagrams but had to switch the reset and CH_PD (pulling reset did nothing, but pulling CH_PD would cause minicom and terminal to react, but in both minicom and terminal I can get ready (after several times pulling CH_PD to ground) and then error and it would exit program. Sometimes after I tried AT I would get a ton of lines with R on the far right. I tried baud 9600, 115200 (best results) and others. I figured I needed to flash it and tried both the 4 binaries from expressif and the integer nodecmu using esptools (limited to raspberry pi) with no luck. I could get it to maybe 10%, I was able to erase the flash on one but no luck flashing anything back. I tried just flashing the boot with no luck. As this point GPIO2 3.3 Von other side of resistor (pull up) GPIO2 at 3.3. In all cases I had pull up resisters. I could read the MAC address too...and flash_id, which was manufacturer 51 device 4014. For flashing I seem to have the best luck with:
VCC 3.3 V
Reset 3.3V on other side of resistor (pull up)
GPIO2 3.3V on other side of resistor (pull up)
CH_PD 3.3V on other side of resistor (pull up) with button to pull to ground
GPIO0 3.3V ground
Ground ground
Transmit receive
Receive transmit
Whatever command I did for esptools I had to ground CH_PD and then shortly after it would take a bit and then fail for various reasons. At this point I kind of want to buy an interface card and use windows instead of raspberry pi...
I had to do a bunch on the pi to get serial to function, mainly disable bluetooth....
Any help is appreciated!!