I was following this tutorial where I could follow everything up until point when I needed to communicate via the Serial Monitor of the Arduino IDE.
This means that I was able to:
And this means that I was unable to:
The messages that I send are appended with both NL & CR, and I use a baudrate of 115200 for the communication.
At this point I am at a loss what else I can try... how can I further debug something like this?
If you think you properly flashed the ESP, you should be able to see it as a node in your network. Start there.
If you do not see it as a node on your network, you did NOT successfully complete the first few steps.
The other issue might be timing. Keep the baud rate at the max speed on the arduino for receive. turn them both off. turn the Arduion on first - wait a couple seconds. The rduino is not running the receive code the instant it boots. After a few seconds, power on the ESP. You may not see the text you expect, but you should at least see goobly-gook.
If you do see goobly-gook, you will need to pick the right baud rate so the arduino matches the ESP, and boot them as pairs.
If you do not see goobly-gook, check your wiring. If you are confident in your wiring, buy a new ESP as you likely burnt it out in the recent past with bad wiring :(