To get reliable results with my boards, I had to play around with the #ESP8266-01 Breakout board and get it to work. Here are some tips that are probably only interesting for mac users.

I managed to upload the nodemcu bootloader on a mac, using the http://esptool.py (https://github.com/themadinventor/esptool) and the following command:

./http://esptool.py  -p /dev/tty.usbserial-AH00ZRT7 write_flash 0x00000 ../../firmware/nodemcu_float_0.9.6-dev_20150406.bin 

And we are in the blinking game! I was not running the right JDK on my mac, had to update to JDK 8 and add the paths to the shell script in order to start the jar file.

#!/bin/bash

export JAVA_HOME=/System/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk1.8.0_45.jdk/Contents/Home
export PATH=$PATH:/System/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk1.8.0_45.jdk/Contents/Home/bin

java -jar "ESPlorer.jar"

http://esp8266.ru/esplorer/

One note - may be I've inserted the LED the wrong way, but I had to inverse LOW and HIGH in the lua script example for the Breakout board.