I guess my first question is with these examples (blinky, basic_example, iOt_Demo), should we still see the normal (ready) message at power up and should we be able to interact with the board using AT commands? I guess I'm a little unclear about where the AT interface is located and whether when we build the examples, we are building that too and flashing it.
For instance, the blinky program looks like it just toggles GPIO2 every 10 seconds or so. I haven't hooked an LED up to it to see if that's working, but I do see a couple characters spit out on the serial console about every 10 seconds. But again, nothing readable, and no interaction from my part is accepted.
The basic_example program, just spits out a continuous stream of unreadable characters if I have the serial console running, so I have no idea if it's working properly.
The iOt_Demo program spits out what seems like it would be about the right number of characters at powerup, but again, unreadable. And it doesn't seem to respond to any of my commands as well.
Since there's not even a readme file for any of these examples, it's hard to know what I should expect from these things.
When flashed with the official firmware everything works just as it should. I haven't seen any quirks or strange behavior. I can connect to my network, ping the ESP, it's all good. But I really want to see if I can get some custom firmware running properly before I dive in and start coding something.