ESP8266 Community Forum

All three are powered using an external 3.3v power supply. I've tried connecting them to an Arduino Uno, Nano, Pro Micro and FTDI usb to serial board, and uploading sketches via the Arduino IDE (set to Generic 8266 on the appropriate COM port. However, I can't for the life of me get them to respond to AT commands, or display an IP address or do the basic blink test with the blue LED, no matter how I wire the pins.

On the serial monitor, I CAN see the boot log at 78800 baud, but that's it. Nothing else works, no responses or activity that suggests the chips work.

Can anyone point me towards a decent troubleshooting guide? Pretty much every Beginner's Guide I've used so far suggests I should be seeing a Ready message or an OK response to send AT, but doesn't explain what to do if you can't even get that far.

if you upload a sketch to esp8266, it replaces the AT firmware

You bought yourself an ESP-01, am I right?


There's no sense in re-explaining everything here, whilst there are loads of walk-throughs all over the internet.

Some things to consider when not using a development board (which would take out all the trouble you're now facing in one go):

• Like JurajA mentioned: you can have only one piece of firmware active at a time.
  By default (most) ESP8266's come with AT firmware installed; please consider this as DEMO-software: it's nice for playing around with and test whether communication with the ESP works, but it can't seriously be used for actual development.
• The bare ESP only works correctly (prolonged) on 3.3V±10% and needs ample power supply of, lets say 400mA minimum (but preferably some more), so don't feed it 5V levels without protection (LDO, level shifter, voltage divider circuit, ...).
• To put an ESP into programming mode, you'll have to set certain pins (GPIO0, GPIO2 and GPIO15)

You might want to direct your questions (after having read through some on-line articles) in the Newbie corner on this forum instead.