Flaky ESP8266 Behavior
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Flaky ESP8266 Behavior
The EP8266 is great: It gives your IoT device WLAN and IP connectivity for only a few bucks.
On the other hand, the ESP8266 is quite a hand full: It creates power spikes that have negative impact on its own operation and possibly that of your circuit, it experiences out-of-the-blue resets that have to be dealt with, and it suffers hang-ups that can only be cured with a hardware reset or uttering "The IT Crowd" mantra ("have you tried turning it off and on again"; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nn2FB1P_Mn8).
My Arduino library uses three levels of measures to straighten out the balking chip:
- Soft-reset, by issuing a "restart" command to the ESP
- Hard-reset, by connecting an Arduino digital port pin to the reset pin of the ESP. This just requires a piece of cable. And an IO pin.
- "Turn if off and on again", by connecting an Arduino digital port pin to a transistor that controls the ESP power supply. That requires a transistor and minor wiring. And another IO pin.
You can't do more without modifying the ESP8266 firmware. Wait, you can: check out Sufficient Power Supply regarding power spikes.