I'm currently designing an esp8266-based board for a project. It has an LM317 for voltage regulation and the esp8266 is used to drive a RFID card reader (those RC522 reader board from china) and some addressable LED (WS2812). I also took an antenna design from Texas Instruments documentation (AN043 antenna) which is used in most of esp8266 designs I've seen so far.
Thus I've made a PCB and ordered it already assembled from jlc pcb a couple of weeks ago. It has a bit of an odd design, but it's on purpose.
When I received the pcb I ordered an FTDI from Amazon (FT232) and tried to program the esp8266. First thing I've learned is that I've had connected the wrong pin to the reset header (facepalm). I Bypassed this problem by unplugging it to reset it. So, I connected the GPIO0 to GND, reset it and try to flash it with Arduino : Trying to connect : Timeout error. I tried different config, different baudrate : same result. Triple checked my wiring and seemed good.
When I reset, my esp8266 sends garbage characters. I read online it was a common thing, so I don't know if I need to worry about it. I also tried sending AT command with Arduino serial monitor, but no response (AT and AT+RST same result).
After this I tried with my terminal and esptool to get more info about my problem. So I ran "python esptool.py -p COM3 --trace -b 115200 read_mac" and got the same error and not very interesting logs.
only this log in loop as I could expected it:
_TRACE +0.051 command op=0x08 data len=36 wait_response=1 timeout=0.100 data=
0707122055555555 5555555555555555 | ... UUUUUUUUUUUU
5555555555555555 5555555555555555 | UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU
55555555 | UUUU
TRACE +0.001 Write 46 bytes:
c000082400000000 0007071220555555 | ...$........ UUU
5555555555555555 5555555555555555 | UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU
5555555555555555 5555555555c0 | UUUUUUUUUUUUU.
TRACE +0.101 Timed out waiting for packet header
Since the esp8266 gives absolutely 0 response except garbage code at startup, it seems that the problem is hardware and comes from the esp board itself (not the ftdi).
I hope someone can help me. Thank you in advance for your ideas.