Nodemcu-firmware: recent firmwares very actively print garbage on the console

[Habbie]

Expected behavior

Powering the device quickly gives me a Lua prompt.

Actual behavior

Console is filled with garbage, speed apparently mostly dependent on the baudrate I pick. Blue LED on Nodemcu board also blinks actively.

NodeMCU version

Last good: [8866297c6d7cc35afd25b0f0f666ef90af040300] Remove buffer:write() as ws2812.write() handles buffers (#1408)
First bad: [84c005e85c78b4382e68633ab61e2f4928c838f5] Update to SDK 1.5.4.1 (#1390)

Current dev and master heads are also bad.

In short, the 1.5.4 upgrade commit breaks building for me; the 1.5.4.1 upgrade commit unbreaks building but yields useless firmware.

Hardware

Bisect done on NodeMCU board. Last good and first known bad commits also tested on Wemos D1 Mini with the same result.

[devsaurus]

Please see #1468 et.al. for the correct firnware upgrade procedure.
To build 1.5.4 you need to remove the 1.5.4.1 zip files from cache folder. Makefile was too greedy with wildcard matching back then.

[Habbie]

I did an esptool erase_flash before every write_flash, it was my understanding this is a correct upgrade procedure. Emptying the cache helps for the unbuildables, trying those now.

[Habbie]

Re-bisected with working 1.5.4 builds, updated original text.

[VSpectrum]

Following #1468 , I flashed the esp_init_data_default.bin. Although I was using an ESP-12E (4 MB) flashing the init_data to 0x3fc000 resulted in the same problem (endless blinking after reset and garbage output). However flashing to address 0x7c000 seemed to work for me:

esptool.py --port /dev/ttyUSB0 write_flash 0x00000 nodemcu-master-10-modules-2016-08-25-16-25-29-float.bin 0x7c000 esp_init_data_default.bin

Is the note made concerning the addresses to flash to in http://nodemcu.readthedocs.io/en/master/en/flash/ confirmed?

[devsaurus]

Yes, the addresses are working, given you configured the flash correctly.
Please also specify the command line parameters -fm and -fs as mentioned there.

[VSpectrum]

$ esptool.py --port /dev/ttyUSB0 write_flash 0x00000 nodemcu-master-10-modules-2016-08-25-16-25-29-float.bin 0x3fc000 esp_init_data_default.bin -fm dio -fs 32m 

Adding and specifying the flashmode and flashsize flags worked for me, thanks.

[Habbie]

-fm dio -fs 32m also work on my NodeMCU. Apparently these things have become stricter with SDK 1.5.4.1. Thank you for your patience, @devsaurus!

[rohit-gandhe]

Where do I get esp_init_data_default.bin? I don't see it in my bin dir after the build.

[rohit-gandhe]

Never mind, downloaded as part of the SDK