ESP8266 Community Forum

- Thu Mar 12, 2015 1:35 am #11848 Here is what i can tell about ESP8266 powering:
12V 1A, 5V 1A, or 5v to a cheap little power bar does not tell a thing if it is a good power or not.
You should really know the quality of your power supply. Expensive is not always good. Cheap my not be bad at all.
But you must have a way to test your power supply if you think you have power supply issue.

Here are some test i made with how i power my modules:

using original apple charger: not 100 percent good. sometimes, data request is not complete.


using 5V from my wall mount AC adaptor: same as apple charger.


using 5v supply from tp-link router. 100 percent ok.


i have that project for many months now. i started that with a tplink router power supply. never had issue.
just recently, i tried to use the 2 other supplies, and i had issue. took me a while to figure out because i thought the issue was due to updates i constantly do with my firmware. but the small issue, "missing chars on data requested" was related to bad power supply.

I dont have problems now with esp8266 with that power supply set up.
before i used to have a lot of those. there were units i tested that run 100% ok for a week, and after a week, it will start to run crazy and will reboot from time to time.

esp8266 seems really a good chip. i have units running in the industry now.
i just have a feel that the manufacturer still have a lot under their sleeves. well, that seems really obvious.

- Thu Mar 12, 2015 11:51 am #11886 All of the power source configurations I've tried read 4.95v, & 3.26v after the step down.
Is that not good enough? At some point I plan on running my device on batteries, but if the 8266 can't tolerate slight deviations in power it sounds like I should be looking for a different chip.
Would you agree?

- Thu Mar 12, 2015 12:49 pm #11887 Of course, try reflashing as was suggested.

But if you're using a switch-mode power supply you could get problems no matter what. Don't use switch-mode power supplies for sensitive circuits like microcontrollers and such.

- Tue Mar 17, 2015 10:15 pm #12153 So I figured out the problem...I just got another 8266 in the mail today and got it working perfectly.
However, I had the Arduino IDE up and uploaded the bare minimum sketch to the Arduino while the esp8266 was still plugged in - the upload failed and now the new chip constantly reboots. The Arduino is fine, I can hook up other sensors to it (or in this case new 82666's) and they work fine so apparently leaving the 8266 in while uploading code to the arduino can kill it.

So, my next step is to reflash it. I've seen scattered documentation all over the web and have seen all kinds of different firmware flavors.

So that leaves me with a couple questions:
Is there a good blog/tutorial out there for flashing on Windows?
Where can I find the stock AT firmware .bin file?

Again, I've seen all kinds all firmware flavors over the web but I haven't been able to conclude which one is the stock firmware.

Thanks!