ESP connected directly to Arduino serial

Hello Folks,
reading in lots of forum that softwareserial is not very good for esp8266, it work only for few instructions because it can't control flow...and it's better to use normal serial in addition of an ftdi converter connected to other two pins (to be used for debug).

I notice that esp8266 with softwareserial is very JUNKY and instable... and i suppose that it depend from my hardware.... but pheraps i can solve all my problems... !

What do you think about it ?

From my experience, this instability issue onyl exists with earlier firmwares,
"altsoftserial" arduino library works a little better than "softserial" library. Also tried with an Arduino Mega which has 4 hardware serials, no joy as well.

This dramatically changed with espressif AT fw 0.9.5 which seems a lot more stable and tolerant (or: not as crappy) as the earlier versions.

Also tried "frankenstein" fw - nice to play with, but also sometimes crashes and has no UART-to-TCP functionality yet, just interactive shell..

Then I tried nodeMCU firmware (also interactive shell, and can run uploaded LUA code, there even exist some libraries for some sensors - similar to arduino.

NodeMCU ist the best of those firmwares at present time, I think. But if you are using arduino, you should use espressif AT 0.9.5.

Another two things regarding stability: arduino nano cannot supply much current via its 3.3 regulator and esp8266 needs a lot of current, maybe try separate 3,3V power supply for the esp. And: right after shipment those modules work really bad, this can be remedied sometimes by simply re-flashing the same firmware over.

regards

Thanks a lot for answers! Yes I use an ams1117 3.3v with an 1a supply to power esp. Tomorrow i retry to flash modules with 0.95 ( i have 0.92!) and try nodemcu !

Hope to be more lucky than yesterday! (4 hours trying)

Dario