Another...Serial Monitor Output Garbage problem esp8266 (NodeMCU dev board)

Projects Programming
1

Please go easy on me I have recently received an Arduino Uno R3 as a Christmas present and have now caught the bug and getting in over my head on another project.

I am wanting to program some home automation widgets and purchased a NodeMCU esp8266 dev board(HiLetgo NodeMCU) to practice with before developing the final project.

I have uploaded the simple blink sketch and that is working as it should. I even changed the output pins to ensure the GPIO's are working as they should and they checked out.

I am trying to get the sketch program "Wifiscan" to find my home ssid just to make sure the WiFi is working. But when I open the serial monitor sometimes I will get a line of repeating question marks "????????" and sometimes I will get nothing. Upon pressing the reset button on the board I can get the bootloader information to be printed to the serial monitor (seen in the picture attached). Baud rates are the same. Pictures are of the actual program and the serial monitor have been attached. Within void setup() I added a serial.printf("Setup Begin"); and after a reset I do not even see this line of code output on the serial monitor.

I have the nodemcu esp8266 connected directly to the PC through the micro USB connector on the board. Sketches are uploaded through the Arduino IDE software. I have downloaded the proper drivers and added the board to the IDE board manager.

Please go easy on me and thank you for your help.

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2

Serial Monitor issues are generally related to baud rate.
You need to have that set correctly and also termination characters set properly.

3

You have Serial.begin(115200) in your setup.

That means you need to have serial monitor also set to '115200 baud' down in the bottom right corner.
You also probably need to have the other drop box, next to it, set to 'both NL & CR'

4

not all esp boards are reset when you open Serial Monitor. see in boards.txt

5

boylesg:
You have Serial.begin(115200) in your setup.

That means you need to have serial monitor also set to '115200 baud' down in the bottom right corner.
You also probably need to have the other drop box, next to it, set to 'both NL & CR'

I have both the serial monitor and the code in the sketch set to 115200 baud and set "Both NL & CR".

Still the same problem with more gibberish output.

Could this boil down to a bad chip?

6

You'll see gibberish from the ESP when starting up, but after it starts up, you shouldn't.

You'll see this behavior when you connect directly to it and power it up.

7

ieee488:
You'll see gibberish from the ESP when starting up, but after it starts up, you shouldn't.

You'll see this behavior when you connect directly to it and power it up.

I have had it running for 10 mins with no sign of the gibberish ending

8

I only have ESP-01 as point of reference.
But I hope you have a separate power supply for the NodeMCU board.

9

I got that problem with one of my esp8266, I tried with another one and the Serial print worked this time.

Don't want to extend this to every "inverted question mark problem" but a bad chip/module/PCB is a possibility, as it was in my case.