ESPeasy ESP12e --- WLAN AP Problem after flashing

[njordan]

Hi,
i have a strange situation.....have 2 ESP12e's from different source....did flash via ESP8266Flasher.exe my first item and R78....straight forward...works very nice and well....now I did flash the second some days later....but this time after flashing I do not see any ESP_0 WLAN Network to configure via 192.168.4.1......did reflash...did not change...even used the "original" flash.cmd directly from the R78 release which seems to also clean the flash memory...again same situation...all flashes fine without any error....but no AP to connect to in order to configure......

Any idea what I may have missed, at least my believe is that I have not done anything different this time.....

Regards and thanks for help!

[njordan]

hi, nobody else had this issue before....hm

[Drum]

Actually, there have been a lot of postings regarding Flashing issues, which is what I suspect this is. So many in fact that it is difficult to get a search result!

The biggest problem I have seen (and experienced) is getting good power to the ESP, and for me it is worse on a breadboard. Don't ssume your power supply is good, test it, try another, put a big cap on it.

You can see a lot of threads in the General discussions but do yourself a favor and make sure you are getting good power. I wasted a lot of time because my usb ftdi adapters were junk. Okay for programming but power is totally unreliable.

[njordan]

thanks for your feedback....
I was aware that ESP is very sensitive in terms of 3.3V supply - so i never used FTDI USB-Adapter, insted I'm using AM117 with max 800mA....which should hopefully be sufficient....I will today add a capacity of either 220uF or 470uF which I guess is almost crazy - even if I know that the WLAN part may have peaks that are a major source of power usage....

What makes me very unsure is the fact that the flasing it self works properly to 100% success....which I guess means that the flash procedure was/is successful....or is this a wrong thought...and nevertheless flashing could also not been successful?

What flasher tool is best to use....did try the GUI one (black gui)....the one cmd line based in the ZIP...no matter what......also read about zombie effects and clear flash steps to be taken upfront but all of these things did not work.....so very confused and little frustrated that 1 works fine and another does not.....is it likely that some of the 8266 in the marked are fake/low quality ???? in ebay and everywhere else you find these items so often that i guess this is like with all other electronics an area for faker's.

Regards
Norber

[costo]

It is better to have several different capacitors instead of one big capacitor over the 3.3V rail.
100nF and 2.2uF and 330uF all three over the Vcc line and the smaller capacitor as close to the ESP module as possible.
The 100nF capacitor is always already in the ESP module over Vcc and Gnd. I usually solder a tantalium capacitor of a few uF directly over Vcc and the metal case of ESP 7/12. This is for best stability if you use breadboard.
If you solder the ESP module you can place a tantalium capacitor of 1 to 4.7 uF close to the ESP.
The biggest capacitor of a few hundred uF can be placed near the power supply connector and is meant to filter 50/60 Hz and small voltage dips.

[njordan]

Thanks....will try this multi-cap approach....i really thought that 470uF close to the ESP should be the ultimative killer....will give your split approach another try....

One question in between.....does it mean that if flashing was successful that the parts flashed are all OK? is there any check....or could it also be the case that the message "successful" does not say anything about the quality of the information sent to the ESP?.....after flashing i plugged in the serial monitor.....I can see a lot of erase sector,....messages and wrong/unknown PID or similar.....hm?