I thought I would add a quick post about these handy but cantankerous wifi micro controllers. There is a lot of information out there but on further inspection you end up getting dragged solely down the ESP8266 route and away from the sp12e module. It has a micro usb interface which supplies power (limited) and doubles as a serial interface for flashing and programming. I am sure anyone who has one is bored by now so here's a quick start guide.
1. Go on youtube first. Its far easier. I spent a few long hours reading manuals and tapping pins out drawing maps on scrap pieces of paper. As a last report on a puzzle using it to publish to the web I got my answer from the first vid I watched, I had not flashed it properly. Anyway if you want to read then links below but easy start is using ESPlorer after watching https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-a2-p0GKIdw .
https://github.com/nodemcu/nodemcu-flasher this is the most important thing to do.
https://github.com/4refr0nt/ESPlorer this is the IDE it uses .
2. I tried it on the arduino IDE first and it worked, There are plenty of websites out there were guys have spent a lot of time helping others get as much out of these as possible. there are plenty of examples in the ardruino libraries and although its a bit hit or miss you learn more trying to work round the errors. The board has to be added in boards manager NodeMCU 1.0 ESP12E module. To do this in ardruino IDE go file preferences then add this url to the boars url on the bottom half of the preferences page. http://arduino.esp8266.com/versions/1.6.5-1084-ga39ce29/package_esp8266com_index.json
So above was how it interfaced to program and like any new toy took a bit of sweat and tears to get used to it and pretending to have a system with the flash and reset button just before uploading or was it just as uploading...the reset does need pressed a lot during coding.
So I used it to light a lamp first of all just to test it on arduino IDE. I then tried it with sensors DHT11 (Digital Humidity) and a DS18B20 (ds1820) thermometer and managed to get them to broadcast over wifi my local temp and humidity (used 3 fields) over www.thingspeak.com.
great little gadget for the price, loves power eats batteries if standalone. 3.3v doesnt put out enough power for some devices, the DHT11 had issues. Even with USB i felt the need to add a 5v supply to the Vin when I was using it. The mapping was not consistent over the 3 I used. I think I fried the first one and internally shorted a few pins.
I know its not a full road test but a short run down. The boards I had were SP12E Dev kit version 2 from www.doit.am