I have to manually break (or put in a button) the D0/GPIO16 to RST ping jumper.
Another observation - if I connect GPIO16 and RST out of the box, it doesn't start and stays in this same mode on initial boot, until I break the link and let it boot up.
I've read about a need to pull up GPIO0 and GPIO2 with 4.7K resistors to a VCC line, as well as a mention of 10-15K pull up resistor for the GPIO-RST, although it didn't seem to help in my case.
I admit I could have easily messed up something, I'm definitely a newbie to the hardware scene
It looks like if I resolve the problem of esp12 getting stuck on initial boot my wake up problems will get solved too. The symptoms are the same: it spits garbage out on serial, flashes the led at a medium speed and won't proceed until I break GPIO-RST link (even without any resistors).
Please help