Sonoff basic does not boot

[xoseperez]

Originally reported by: Andreas L. (Bitbucket: andreaslink, GitHub: andreaslink-de)

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Hej, I have two sonoff basic and I made a simple ESPurna setup with Arduino. I flashed that successfully on my first sonoff and it runs like a charm incl. WiFi and MQTT. I did the exact same process again with my second sonoff basic, but it does not boot at all. No LED blinks, no serial output, but flashing process seemed to be successful according to Arduino IDE. And as said before, I did everything as I also did before (several times).

I compared both PCBs with a magnifying glass and I cannot see any differences. The only difference might be the ESP8266 (see attachments). Both have an ESP8266, but one was manufactured (as I guess) at 08-2017 and the other at 07-2017 (they are fairly new). But this can't be the issue, I would guess? Did anyone recognize a similar behaviour?

When running it with the initial/original firmware it also works and runs as expected. So it's not damaged. I also took a backup of the former firmware and when I restore this original one with esptool, it works again as expected. So there seems to be "something different" that the ESPurna firmware or me during flashing can't handle, do you agree or do you have an idea?

BTW: I also tried to flash a simple LED-test-example to only let the GPIO 13 (LED) turn on and off again, but nothing happens, so I guess it simply does not boot at all, what I had flashed.

/Andreas

[xoseperez]

Original comment by Andreas L. (Bitbucket: andreaslink, GitHub: andreaslink-de):

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Ha, I guess I solved it by proceeding with googling it by myself :-). There is one really(!) important thing to keep in mind while flashing an ESP8266 to prevent sideeffects and this is the flashmode. This needs to be set to DOUT and then it works:

I'll keep that in mind for the future and I can only recommend to update documentation to focus on this "feature" when using Arduino!

This might also solve other issues, when flashing with esptool.py use --flash_mode dout as an additional param.
Example would be:

esptool.py --port /dev/ttyUSB0 --baud 115200 write_flash --flash_mode dout 0x00000 espurna-1.8.3-sonoff-debug.bin

PS: I finally found this hint here: https://github.com/arendst/Sonoff-Tasmota and this refers to https://github.com/arendst/Sonoff-Tasmota/wiki/Theo's-Tasmota-Tips with a more detailed explanation.

[xoseperez]

Original comment by Andreas L. (Bitbucket: andreaslink, GitHub: andreaslink-de):

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Issue was solved with flashing with flash mode DOUT in the Arduino IDE.