ESP8266 Community Forum

For some strange reason I cannot seem to send AT commands using either Arduino IDE or Putty. I am using an FTDI/USB adapter and have the wiring correct. Setting Baud rate to 74880 with IDE I get :

ets Jan 8 2013,rst cause:2, boot mode:(1,7),

or something different depending on which module I use.

Which tells me at least I am at least getting something.

I have tried every baud setting in Arduino IDE. If I get something, it is gibberish. Or I get nothing. I have tried 3 power sources,with a 1000uF capacitor. That rules out baud rates, and power issues. I have tried 4 of the ESP-01's and also the Huzzah, that rules out the module itself being faulty. I have redone my wiring probably a dozen times now. I have mostly used an empty sketch, but I have used sketch's that work perfectly fine in the IOT world, but nothing happens with AT commands. (I can, for example, get online and switch relays from my moms house 2 hours away with no problems.) I have tried Putty and Arduino IDE. I have restarted the module itself, I have set GPIO-2 to ground, floating, and positive.

It is something small I am missing here, and if any has a suggestion I am all ears. Is it my sketch's? This shouldn't be that complicated, its the most basic function of the device and yet I can't seem to get it to function. So....yeah....I am a feeling like a total noob here. Which I am, I won't deny.

Too much info probably, but I'm hoping we can get past the obvious "Have you restarted it" type responses that I constantly see on Google search for this problem.

Once you burn ESP8266 Flash using the Arduino IDE, the AT command firmware is erased and overwritten. The ESP will no longer respond to AT commands.

If you are managing to flash code from Arduino IDE OK then you could put in just a basic sketch that just sends out a string on the serial line. Like in setup()
Serial.begin(115200);
Serial.println("Running");

You should then see this on the Arduino terminal or Putty each time you reset.

If you can't flash or think you may have done a bad flash then you can flash back the firmware that does the AT commands. You need to use a separate flash tool and you need to have an AT bin file. There are lots of guides on how to do this.

As a novice to using the ESP-8266, it took a lot of time and effort to be able to successfully communicate with the device. For me, the most successful environment to get started was connecting the ES-01 board to my PC using an Adafruit CP2104 USB-UART Bridge and using Hyperterminal (a Windows program) set at 115,200 baud to communicate. (Make sure you set the ASCII properties to add an LF after a CR is entered.) This set up enabled me to try out all of the AT commands.

The reason that I went this route is because I kept getting "failed to sync" errors when I tried to download any code to the ESP-8266 using the Arduino board.

With the communication link working properly, I will try to use the Espressif Download Program to flash the ESP-8266.