Hooked up 3.3v voltage regulator with an led to the 5v off the ftdi cable and checked that with a meter carefully. Then hooked up the esp8266 to serial and power.
So far the best command in the Mac shell I've found is:
`screen /dev/cu.usbserial-AJ02ZE2K 9600`
The slower 9600 is apparently common for later devices.
I also had to tie the non-gpio pins to 3.3v (reset and ch_pd). Now it prints a basic message when reset and also echos characters, but I'm pretty sure that it isn't understanding newline as gnu-screen is sending it, as it doesn't do anything besides return the cursor to the start of the line when I hit return.
[Vendor:www.ai-thinker.com Version:0.9.2.4]
ready
The little blue light flashes when I type, so I'm pretty sure the serial link is working other than "return". A good start, but I seem to be stuck on this issue currently. I can't seem to find anything that allows me to adjust what screen is sending for newline/carrage return. I'm guessing that because it's a Mac and it has a different idea about what should be sent for return versus an expected crlf set?