ESP8266, taking a break

After too many hours spent trying to make an Arduino board talk to the ESP8266 module, I decided to take a break and:

• buy a 5V/3.3V level conversion module
• upgrade ESP8266 firmware while waiting for the delivery

With the upgrade I should be able to reduce the serial speed to a more bearable 9600 baud and hopefully get more consistent behavior of AT commands.

I even built a converter board based on a circuit I found online. I replaced 2N7000 with BF245 from my FET drawer but all I got was wrong voltages or a form of short circuit. Nevermind, even if I am loosing a chance to learn something new, I do not have enough time for this kind of troubleshooting: I want to have that WiFi board working and uploading data!