ESP8266 Community Forum

Hi,
I've managed to brick my ESP-01 by flashing it with esptool in an attempt to switch to an older Lua firmware.
The command I used was as follows:



I think that there should have been another '0' in the after the write_flash...
I've tried to flash again with the added 0 in esptool and also in Windows which is where I flashed it to the latest Lua originally but the software doesn't see the module anymore.

Does anyone know if I can recover it? Right now it just spouts out gibberish.

I'm guessing that I've overwritten something that I shouldn't have...

The command I use for flashing on Linux is:

esptool.py --port write_flash 0x00000 firmware/0x00000.bin 0x40000 firmware/0x40000.bin

So you may need to flash both the 0x00000.bin and 0x40000.bin parts of the firmware. I thought the firmware downloader was unflashable, and it wasn't really possible to brick the esp8266 but I could be wrong. I also don't see why your command should have resulted in a break, I don't think the number of 0s should matter.

I believe it should always be possible to recover the device by reflashing the SPI flash, however you'd need to interface with it directly. And with the boards being so cheap it's possibly not worth the hassle.

I've used the LUA flash tool (from https://github.com/nodemcu/nodemcu-flasher) to recover ESP modules that I thought were bricked. Works pretty well I think.