ESP8266 Community Forum

The terminal program I use, picocom, doesn't support this baud rate

For this reason, in my linked post, I point you to CoolTerm!
The boot time messages can point you to all manner of issues when your code does not run as expected.
I always set my main code to run at 74880 so that I can see if there are any boot messages indicating issues with my code.

Thank you for the hint, AcmeUK.
I'm 100% Linux, CoolTerm is a bad option for me, got it to work with picocom, just for reference:

/usr/bin/picocom -ex -b 75000 -d 8 -p n --omap crcrlf /dev/ttyUSB0

I can read output from the boot-loader.

esptool.py read_flash
reports:
> Detected crystal freq 27.65MHz is quite different to normalized freq 26MHz.
That would mean baud-rate 79632, but who knows how accurate this probing is. Maybe it's a counterfeit from China^WEurope
Anyway, 75000 works for me and am happy to have learned something thank to you, AcmeUK

I'm 100% Linux, CoolTerm is a bad option for me

Just for information, CoolTerm is available for Windows, Mac and Linux