ESP8266 Community Forum

- Wed Jun 24, 2015 1:58 pm #21541

Just as an aid perhaps, I connect both pins to high direct . Have not bothered to implement any resistors yet .

That is not a good practice on "undetermined I/O state", it is only good and it is "known Input Only".

It's guaranteed that RESET and CHIP_EN pins are inputs when the ESP8266 is first powered up, so as long as the user code doesn't ever make them outputs, shorting them to high shouldn't cause a problem.

- Thu Jun 25, 2015 7:28 am #21602 I have confirmed that a 10 kohm pullup on the CHIP_EN pin is too weak and seems to put the IC in an unknown state causing it to burn up. A 5 kohm pullup on this pin works fine.

- Thu Jun 25, 2015 8:54 am #21610

Lotus,
I don't have any thoughts or guidance to provide but your post resonates with me. I have found that my ESP8266s get "boiling hot" very quickly and yet check after check after check seems to show that I have wired them correctly. I figured I had "fried" them and have ordered a bunch more for testing so that I can get "scientific" on my tests and make notes to the point where the heat starts getting generated. But to the best of my knowledge, I can't see any explicit shorts and yet apply a 3.3V to the device causes it to heat to "burn to the touch" temperature. I can recreate this at will.

It relieves me to think that there might be others out there who are experiencing the same.

Hi Kolban,

Are you saying that all your ESP8266s always do this? And they never work?

- Thu Jun 25, 2015 9:58 am #21621 I am following the schematic described here:

https://github.com/esp8266/arduino

(The exception is that I did NOT connect Vcc from power supply to Vcc on USB).

I had 3 ESP8266s ... one an ESP8266-1 and two ESP8266-12. Tinkering with this, all three ended up in the "massively overheating" state. For the 1st one, I figured I had messed up and fried it. For the 2nd, I had more confidence in my circuit having checked that all was good in the wiring. The third was a "lemming" ... I plugged it in to "see if it would happen again" ... and it did. I am now out of ESP8266s but have 10 more on order So I can't do any more tests until the parts arrive in 2-3 weeks.

Free ESP8266 book available for download here.