ESP8266 Community Forum

I hope this is the right place for this sort of support questions.

Prior to this, I had been using an ESP-01 with a FT232R USB-to-UART on OS X Yosemite (which comes with built-in drivers for it). I was able to flash using esptool.py, and communicate using screen, ESPlorer, or minicom. All good.

Then I received my NodeMCU hardware. It's nice!. It came with NodeMCU firmware loaded and the SiLabs USB-to-UART chip. I installed the drivers for the USB-to-UART and was able to communicate with the NodeMCU just fine. Oddly, however, I couldn't talk to it with minicom (I don't know what to make of that but maybe it's helpful information to someone). I started developing right away with the stock firmware but at some point I uploaded a change that caused it to crash when executing init.lua. Rookie mistake, yes. The way out, I thought, was to flash a new firmware, which I wanted to do anyway. So I built it using Marcel Stör's excellent online tool: http://frightanic.com/nodemcu-custom-build

I flashed as usual (hold FLASH button while pressing RST which I think is equivalent to connecting GPIO0 to GND, use esptool.py), but ever since all I get is the dreaded

at 74880 baud rate.

For what it's worth, and hopefully so someone can point out the stupid mistake I'm making, here's how I'm attempting to flash the chip:



One interesting observation is that esptool.py communicates with the NodeMCU without me needing to reset while holding the FLASH button. Thanks for the help!

Can you just draw your circuit and scan it in here or photo it ?

Just to close the loop on this:
I was able to flash from a Windows PC, so I think this is an issue with the tools I was using on the Mac. The hardware itself was fine.

I had a similar problem. It turns out the ESP-12E needs to be flashed in "DIO" mode. So try adding "--flash_mode dio" to your command line after "write_flash".