ESP8266 Community Forum

- Wed Aug 19, 2015 2:02 pm #26500 At the middle of the topic of http://internetofhomethings.com/homethings/?p=396 there are some software tricks to be done to try to un-brick the ESP.
Practically they tray to write a blank firmware on the ESP to complete erase the flash memory.
I agree, change the flash memory is not easy and it's not cheaper.

I don't know if it's possible to do a flash mem test.
An idea is to write a blank firmware and after read it from ESP and made a bit to bit compare.
I think if the flash is dead the compare is wrong.

- Thu Aug 20, 2015 4:52 am #26547

@BarnabyBear, your ESP-01 is running absolutely fine, as soon as I powered it up (exact same circuit as I pulled mine out of to send to you).

Hi, thats great news.

It will be interesting to see what BarnabyBear is able to do with my ESP-01.

I dropped yours into my circuit and it returned some serial but did not run. Flashed it with your simple "hello" and it runs fine, so were not out if the woods yet so to speak. But we know its a problem with the flash.

In the mean time, I would keep the one I sent you on one side as a working unit to check your hardware if needed & work on flashing your other unit. Whilst I will follow with interest, if this now moves into compilers & flashing systems, it will move out of my limited field & you may need to seek the assistance of others following this thread.

Last edited by Barnabybear on Thu Aug 20, 2015 10:58 am, edited 1 time in total.

- Thu Aug 20, 2015 9:55 am #26580 Heya,

on my ESP8266 endeavors so far I've bricked two ESP-01's,
one with trying to flash SDK 1.0 onto 512kB unit and that one successfully unbricked with flashing blank512.bin at 0x0,
second one with 5V from Arduino, that one did not budge on flashing but it was successful on 'change me to 4MB SPI RAM' experiment later on.

--
Mozz

- Thu Aug 20, 2015 10:15 am #26583

we know its a problem with the flash.

@BarnabyBear, thanks again for your help with this. Was beginning to despair of ever getting it working again, but at least we have significantly narrowed down the possible causes.

I think (do you agree?) that we have removed the possibility of:
- faulty ESP modules, including their flash chips
- faulty breadboard/wiring/adapters
- insufficient power supply

So as you said, the culprit appears to be a compile and/or flash issue.

I said in an earlier post that I could try firing up my almost-never-used copy of Win7, install IDE 1.6.5 and the ESP package and test that. If that works, it then points to something in the build or install on my PCs of the IDE/ESP package on Linux.