Design Consideration_ESP8266 07 Microcontroller
An excellent summary of the ESP8266 microcontroller hardware can be found in the post A Beginner's Guide to the ESP8266. Espressif, the manufacturer of the ESP8266, also has significant documentation available on their website here.
Despite the many positive features of the ESP8266, the microcontroller is notorious for unwanted system resets, crashes, flash failures and other crashes. Researching this, it seems that the key to avoiding these unwanted artefacts is to design an appropriate hardware interface circuit.
Power stability is one key to problem free operations. The ESP8266 draws significant current, generally 350 mA, but reportedly up to 500mA and "mysterious" resets are frequently attributed to poor power rail stability.
A bare-bones ESP8266 circuit set-up can be found here.
The nice thing about prototyping with a quality Amaci NodeMCU V1.0 development board versus a bare ESP microcontroller was that all the supporting components are built-in and the board is stable and well-tested.
