ESP8266 Community Forum

- Wed Jan 13, 2016 10:51 am #38686 Hi all,

I'm new to this forum and 'rather' new to ESP8266-01 and I can't get it working. I've been struggling for days now! I want to communicate (AT commands) from my Win8 PC to ESP8266 though USB-FTDI. But problem is I can't get any response, yes randomly some random characters.

My setup:
http://www.esp8266.com/wiki/lib/exe/fetch.php?cache=&media=esp8266_flash_prog_board_sch.png
(tried with and without resistors).

What I tried so far:

- Via Arduino UNO
- Different Baut-rates (I think to stick to 115200)
- Other external power source (battery, ex. power supply)
- FTDI 3.3V power
- Different Serial apps (Arduino serial monitor, Putty)
- Adding / removing resistors (CH_PD, Reset)
- Another PC
- Adding decoupling capacitors
- Another ESP8266-01
- Tried to update firmware (ESP_DOWNLOAD_TOOL_V2.4.exe), but couldn't connect to it with Start button. Gave a "Fail". (

All resulted in the same behaviour: I can connect to the serial port but no response!

And oh, wait; when I play around with the CH_PD pin (adding and removing to 3.3v) some random crap-chars appears! And only once I managed to get a (human readable error: "Fatal error 28"). But this was only once.

Did I miss something? please help! Thanks!

- Fri Jan 15, 2016 8:43 am #38848 ...I'm starting to think my FTDI is not working well.

Any ideas? Wild guesses are welcome?

Thanks!

- Fri Jan 15, 2016 9:56 am #38857 Have you tried looping the FTDI Tx to Rx? This should checkout the FTDI by echoing back characters sent from a terminal.

- Fri Jan 15, 2016 10:01 am #38859 Thanks for your reply!

Good Idea; I just tried, and that's working fine. I can see the characters I type in Putty.

... so, what can it be? I think I miss something really simple here.