ESP8266 Community Forum

Hi Guys,

I have read so many tutorials and documentation for last 3 day that I really don't understand what is happening.

I got MakerHawk 2pcs ESP8266 ESP-12E Development Board NodeMcu LUA WiFi Internet Development Board New Version CP2102 Chip form amazon, which came with AT firmware preinstalled. I flashed the 0.9.5 firmware with no problem, then i flashed 0.9.6 dev version with no problem at all as well. But everytime I try to flash anything above that (1.5.x + , ready bin or custom build from the cloud service) it won't work. It flashes, but when start it gives only random characters. I use 9600 baud rate and I have tried Esp flash tool and esptool.py with all combinations of options. Nothing seems to work. The blue led used to flash very quickly non stop, tho no it doesn't but still not working.

Can it be some old or defective board?

Thanks for any help.

Pav

I suspect many of those tutorials are somewhat dated? May I recommend that you primarily rely on our official documentation. It's the only thing that we're reasonably certain is accurate

For starters the three most important pages are ones listed in our "Getting started" section - in that order:
- https://nodemcu.readthedocs.io/en/latest/en/build/
- https://nodemcu.readthedocs.io/en/latest/en/flash/
- https://nodemcu.readthedocs.io/en/latest/en/upload/

Build a firmware from the master branch with the cloud builder. You seem to have done that; good. Then if you're on Windows flash the binary with the NodeMCU PyFlasher otherwise use esptool.py directly. Then, and that seems to be the (only?) problem, you need to switch your serial settings of your Lua uploader tool (ESPlorer?) to 115'000 baud. Only the legacy 0.9.x versions used 9'600.

Hi Marcel,

Thank you for all your help. I used your tool, and somehow it worked. I used esptool.py directly many times, using instructions from your official website and it didn't work, but this time is is finally there. IT might have been that after flashing I was trying 9600 in Esplorer the first time I was starting the module.

Anyway, thank you very much for all your help, you saved me a lot of time.

Pav