ESP8266 Community Forum

- Thu Feb 26, 2015 2:31 pm #10821 Hello all,

I just bought some ESP8266, having seen the promising projects all over the internet. I'm now trying to wire it up with my computer, but something is not quite right.

When I got the chip it had a software version AI-thinker.com 0.9.2.4. It said that when I connect to the chip with my computer using a 9600 baudrate serial to USB converter. It creates a wireless network, ESP_XXXXXX, where XXXXXX are the last three bytes of the MAC address. However, whenever I tried writing any command to the chip (I tried mainly

Code: Select allAT

and

Code: Select allAT+RST

), I got zero response. The chip would remain silent.

I then found http://diy.viktak.com/2014/12/first-exp ... p8266.html, which suggested I had the wrong firmware, and I then tried new firmware. I did something wrong here, but I'm not sure what. I downloaded https://github.com/themadinventor/esptool and this works fine. I can, for example, read the MAC from the esp8266. This also suggests that the hardware connections are correct. I could also download the firmware to the computer. I then tried to upload the firmware from here using

Code: Select all./esptool.py write_flash 0x00000 the-file.bin

. This worked fine, and after

Code: Select all./esptool.py run

the chip created a network called AI Thinker or something like that.

However, I still couldn't get the AT commands working, so I tried to reupload the old firmware. Before uploading the AI Thinker version, I had made a backup with the read_flash command. I uploaded that one to the chip, and now I get the ESP_XXXXXX network again. However, when I connect to the chip using the serial port, I'm getting rubbish. With baudrate 9600, as before, I'm getting one random character. Any baudrate up to 115200 gives garbage, although all the time more or less the same. An example, with baudrate 115200:

Code: Select all00000000 73 18 03 00 6C 9C D8 73   DF 00 8C 23 03 E3 6F C0  s...l..s...#..o.
00000010 04 88 E0 0C 18 8C 0C 1C   83 EC 1C 70 8C 3C 8E 83  ...........p.<..
00000020 DF 00 EC 38 03 93 DF C7   93 DC E6 8C 1C 70 0C 18  ...8.........p..
00000030 0C F3 6F 6F E4 03 C4 3B   F3 6F C4 93 DC E4 0C 1B  ..oo...;.o......
00000040 83 0C 63 E7 24 89 73 18   03 73 18 03              ..c.$.s..s..

This is done using moserial under Ubuntu.

Well, summarising, I'm completely confused In the end, I want to connect to the ESP using the serial port of a PIC, similar to what some people have done with Arduino. I basically only need some firmware that I can upload to the chip, that will accept the AT commands properly.

I finally found http://www.electrodragon.com/w/ESP8266#Firmware, but they say I need files that I don't find in the downloads they link to. For example, the ZIP I downloaded following their links doesn't contain a file app.v6.flash.bin, which they then say I should upload to the chip.

If necessary, I could try to compile source code here, but I was kind of hoping I could download a firmware file somewhere that would just work out of the box.

What should I do? I'm on Ubuntu, so I guess that's good...

Many thanks in advance!

- Thu Feb 26, 2015 6:48 pm #10843 As I received the notification that this topic had been approved, I magically got it working.

I had left the GPIO0 pin attached to the serial port as I used it during programming. This made the ESP not boot correctly. I now pulled the line up to 3.3V and it works fine. I can send and receive comments.

Sorry if you spend time on this thread!