Sending commands using UART to ESP8266 is not working

Question

I have the following setup in which I'm trying to use the Arduino FTDI to send commands to ESP8266:

enter image description here

There I have connected the RESET line to GND using the black wire (1) to be able to use the RX and TX lines of the Arduino with the ESP8266 (not sure if this is correct...?). Red wire (2) is connected to 3.3V pin of Arduino. The other black wire (3) is connected to GND on Arduino which is connected to the GND of the ESP8266. The two red wires connected to 3.3V via the green wire are connected to VCC and CH_PD lines on ESP8266. Yellow wire is connected to the RXD on both the ESP8266 and Arduino (pin 0). Blue wire is connected to TXD on both the ESP8266 and Arduino (pin 1).

Based on the commands here and the example here, I wrote the following script to send a command to the ESP8266:

import serial
sp = serial.Serial("/dev/ttyACM0", 9600)
sp.flushInput()
sp.write("AT+RST".encode('utf-8'))

I also tried the full example from GitHub, but in both cases nothing happens. I expect to see the blue LED on ESP8266 to blink, but that doesn't happen. I can see the red LED on ESP8266 is on, so it must be getting power correctly? When I run the Python script, I see the RX LED on the Arduino blinking, so data is received by the Arduino.

• Kartman: Esp8266 requires a good supply of power, so those ‘dupont’ wires won’t cut it. You can get a usb/serial board especially forthe esp01 etc modules that is much more likely to work properly.
• kovac: It turned out that it was the baud rate. But I went out and bought a esp01 and got it set up. Thanks a lot for the advice @Kartman, it's looking so much better now!

Answer 1

The problem was with the baud rate I chose. Instead of 9600, I managed to connect to Wi-Fi using 115200.

I also started using an ESP-01 breakout board with a capacitor to stabilize power. So, that could have helped too. But the primary cause was the baud rate.