I recently received an ESP8266-12. My ESP is (as far as I can tell) correctly hooked up, with power supplied by a 4.5v charger that can provide 1.5A of current, voltage regulated by an LM317 to 3.3v and communications done via a level converter 3.3v-5v.
I have the same issue that many others have wherein upon bringing REST low temporarily, the 8266 will stream out a bunch of garbage characters in response. I am trying to communicate via the Serial Monitor provided by the Arduino IDE, which has worked well with other serial projects in the past. Here's the trouble:
1) No matter what baud rate I select, from 9600 to 115200, the text is always garbled
2) The ESP never responds to any TX from the FTDI, either via blinking LED or via reponse, regardless of what I send (usually "AT\r\n" and variants)
EDIT: UPDATE - after doing more digging on this specific module I learned that sometimes the baud rate is an unconvential 74880bps, so I added that baud rate in. Now I get this message:
ets Jan 8 2013,rst cause:2, boot mode:(7,7)
waiting for host
But the device still refuses to respond to any TX activity regardless.
I have carefully inspected the TX/RX solder joints and checked connectivity with a multimeter but it all looks okay. I am a bit stumped right now where to go from here. The device definitely seems operational, but this is quite frustrating..