ESP8266 Community Forum

Hi forum, I just recently started tinkering with electronics and got hold of a couple of NodeMCUs. I got them running with the Arduino IDE nice and easy. However i'm hitting a roadblock when trying to dig deeper into what makes those little buggers running. Having understood what the ESP8266 is, what regulators and the UART are doing on the boards, I tried to use AT commands via ESPlorer to understand more of the inner workings. However i think i'm trying to go the wrong way. The Lua Interpreter is a much higher level of abstraction and ESPlorer and its AT commands aren't necessary. Basically the ESP doesn't react to anything i throw at it. It can see the Board via the COM Port in ESPlorer but hitting reset just, well, resets the board and if i have any serial output it prints it right there. Now, i have trouble understanding what I misunderstand here. Where is the difference between Firmware/Lua Interpreter/Lua Code i write/AT command stuff? I tried to understand it by digging around but noone seems to have such fundamental problems and or has evolved from the early ESP-01 on until now what with all the NodeMCU boards and an IDE and tons of libraries. I'm happy to accept any laughter if it is followed by clearing up my confusion.

The ESP runs only 1 program/firmware at a time. Different firmware: AT command interpreter, Lua interpreter, any program uploaded using the Arduino IDE.

For example, if the ESP is running the AT firmware, uploading blinky LED firmware erases the AT firmware and replaces it with the blinky LED firmware. The ESP no longer responds to AT commands.

Thank you very much. I assumed wrongly that the firmware would reside somewhere else. Setting verbose output of the Arduino IDE could have told me. Now that i If you don't mind me asking, what would i be looking for if i wanted the AT command interpreter on a NodeMCU?

It's like installing different operating systems on the same machine. You can print out your letter on all of them, but one likes more linux than windows.
One likes, or needs just AT-Commands, another learned lua before, so its more easy then, or C.
All of the solutions brings the esp to communicate with the world over wifi, but there are just different ways to catch the goal.