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Mike pointed out my regulator matters (because of dropout voltage) - I am using this one:

http://www.nteinc.com/specs/1900to1999/pdf/nte1904.pdf

Something to note about flashing - it would take anywhere from 10-50 tries before it would flash successfully, the other times it just failed to upload and spit out the espcomm failure to connect message. This is the only clue to me that maybe my board is just bad, and it won't be able to run any sketch - I ordered another ESP8266, but I'm still wondering if I could be doing something wrong, it seems fairly straight forward, and I have done a lot of research about this up until this point. This is my first arduino project, other than the starter projects.

Any ideas why the onboard LED isn't blinking or is the sketch not running at all. Does the upload problem matter...could it be producing a false positive result? The only other idea I have where something could be different is an output capacitor for the voltage regulator, I have been told that a 10mF capacitor is what I would use (but I have also been told it doesn't matter...and neither does the filter capacitor, I just put it in anyway).

Something to note about flashing - it would take anywhere from 10-50 tries before it would flash successfully, the other times it just failed to upload and spit out the espcomm failure to connect message, or it got halfway through the upload and quit. This is the only clue to me that maybe my board is just bad, and it won't be able to run any sketch - I ordered another ESP8266, but I'm still wondering if I could be doing something wrong, it seems fairly straight forward, and I have done a lot of research about this up until this point. This is my first arduino project, other than the starter projects.

Any ideas why the onboard LED isn't blinking? Or is the sketch not running at all? Does the upload problem matter...could it be producing a false positive result? The only other idea I have where something could be different is an output capacitor for the voltage regulator, I have been told that a 10mF capacitor is what I would use (but I have also been told it doesn't matter...and neither does the filter capacitor, I just put it in anyway).

After flashing the blink sketch to the ESP8266, I removed all the unnecessary wires and my setup to try and run the sketch looks like this:

After flashing the blink sketch to the ESP8266, I removed all the unnecessary wires from flashing - and my setup to try and run the sketch looks like this: