Getting my ESP8266 working

Which ESP8266 do you have? When you talk about AT commands it looks as if your ESP8266 is a wifi module that is ment to be used by a differet MCU.

The ESP8266 is a compact wifi chip.

It is good if you can do AT commands, but you do not really have to do it. There are libraries available that hide all that stuff.

The easiest way to do what are trying to do is to use the Arduino IDE. Install ESP8266 libraries and off you go. Chances are you can simply adapt and add code to the WiFiClient example and connect to your home router to upload stuff on thingspeak.

On the gloomy side, if it was working and is not so now, well it is easy to fry! It is rated at 3.3 V and will easily get destroyed beyond 3.6 V. The inputs are not 5V tolerant. There are other 8266 based modules which provide 5V tolerant inputs for interfacing sensors etc.

Faiz Ishaq

I looked at that library and couldn't figure it out. Need to look at it more. It's not fried I have very careful about voltage and always had it hooked to 3.3v I do have an external supply for it as well so it's not powered by the arduino itself

Alright, the ESP is an MCU by itself, far more powerful than the UNO, but here its only used as a module to give WIFI connectivity through the serial port to the UNO. You have AT commands that you will need to use to perform all kind of network operations, you will need to connect to the WIFI, then connect to Thingspeak and send data. The way you do that is through the UNO, uno will send AT commands to the module to perform all those operations.

So if I read that right. What your saying is I need to tell the uno to send AT commands to the ESP8266 and that's how they will talk and send data?

OK, that is good. I used a nodemcu module to do the same thing a couple of years ago. It has all the I/O that you need so you do not need the UNO for this work. I had to use a little level shifter to accomodate 3.3 V and 5 V sensors.

Faiz Ishaq

Yes!, exactly! you appear to have a sparkfun, there is a PDF with the list of AT commands on their product page. You may want to connect to the module through your PC to test the AT commands and see how the module responds to each. After you get a good feeling on how to use the commands and how the module behaves, or responds to each command, you may want to code the UNO to send the AT commands.

As an alternative, the ESP8266 could work as a standalone and do a lot of stuff without any UNO. But your specific ESP module is ment to be used as I say, receive AT command and perform network operations.

Check this teaser on what the ESP8266 can do! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSiRkpgwVKY

Thank you for the information. I think the light bulb just came on.

The ESPs support all the arduino libs, I would suggest you to get one from ebay (just a few dollars) and just toss the stinky UNO. Did you watch the video that I linked? the ESP is orders of magnitude faster than UNO.