I have some ESP8266-12 boards sold by Adafruit. PCB's silksecreen is Adafruit.Yes, I did all of the obvious things. I bought these ESP8266 chips from aliexpress.com. I am beginning to wonder if they are bad or something.
When using one of the Teensy programs I get a z or an r on start up depending on the baud rate, but no response from any AT command.
https://www.adafruit.com/search?q=esp8266&b=1
I connected an FTDI USB/Serial 3.3V to the board and after a few minutes of flailing, my dumb terminal program (Bray's term) at 9600 baud was talking to the Lua interpreter. I then tried one of the lightweight IDEs (browser based). Nice. So I had some example code and my own first "hello world" via WiFi working in a few minutes.
I didn't try AT commands. Just dumb terminal talking to Lua at first. Lua is doing that lower layer.
I have yet to re-flash it for using C.
For HLL's I prefer Javascript or Python to Lua. But these aren't flushed out yet for the ESP8266, as I read. These make for a fun/fast rapid app, esp. if one has used the language in the past as I have. Not so, Lua.
As I read, the -12 has 4MB of flash in which they put layer 2.5 of 802.11b/g/n and some sort of thread/task manager and the core API code. The newer (TBA) ESP32 increases the RAM to 400KB.
I've been doing much the same with the Particle.io Photon board. Same SoC concept with fenced-off user code that can be uploaded, and same, an on-chip file system for storing these and libraries for the HLLs for use when they "require xxx" or equivalent.
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