ESP8266 Community Forum

Alright so I've googled and searched forums high and low, and cannot seem to solve this problem. I haven't played with ESP's in a little while, but getting into the christmas spirit I've decided to put together some IoT christmas lights and a web app. Anyways I'm using a Bus Pirate as FTDI/UART to talk to an ESP-01 (was an ESP-03, but after running into issues I picked up a new chip thinking the ESP-03 was the problem, which I now suspect isn't true.) the setup is being powered by an external ATX PSU my connections are:
BUS PIRATE-------------------------------------------------ESP-01--------------------------------------------------ATX PSU
||||||||||||||||||||||||| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| ||||||||||||||||
RX(black wire)---------------------------------------------TX(pin 8 near VCC)--------- --------NC
TX(grey wire)----------------------------------------------RX(pin 1 near GND)-------- --------NC
GND----------------------------------------------------------GND--------------------------------------------------------GND
NC------------- --------------CH_PD(pin 3)------------------------------------------3.3V
NC------------- --------------VCC(pin2)-----------------------------------------------3.3V
NC------------- --------------RST(pin5)-----------------------------------------------3.3V
NC------------- --------------GPIO 0(pin 6)-------------------------------------------GND
NC------------- --------------GPIO(pin 4)--------- ---------NC


I have no problems flashing with windows installed in a VM and using the nodeMCU espflasher GUI, but in linux using esptool.py I get:
A fatal error occurred: Failed to connect to ESP8266

and using arduino IDE I get:
warning: espcomm_sync failed
error: espcomm_open failed

I also want to metion that using nodeMCU FW at baud 9600 is working just fine. I also tried commenting out the line in esptool.py that throws the error as suggested in another forum, but it just get caught at the next error: invalid head of packet.

So idk how or why it worked, but I decided to use minicom instead of screen to communicate with my bus pirate before setting BP as a UART with transparent bridge. Much to my surprise the command esptool.py -p /dev/ttyUSB0 run actually friggin worked! I've only been trying to run it for 3 days now. If anyone can explain to me why it worked I'd be glad to listen, nut I just wanted to let you guys know that I solved it myself, and that I suck for clogging up your nifty forum with this likely useless post (unless someone else is having this issue then they should try minicom and see if it helps)