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By rudy
#74431
I placed a .1uF cap across the bread board power rails and another from the VCC pin to the ground rail. I also added a 470uF cap across the power rails.


Why do you have so much wire between the caps and the point you are trying to filter? You need good regulation at the module. Not six inches away. Take a look at stuff like NodeMCU boards. (not my favorite but what comes to mind right now) The regulator and caps are at the ESP module. Not a light year away.
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By perigalacticon
#74433 There is a ceramic .1uF cap with one lead in the ESP01 VCC breadboard 'pin strip' and one lead in the ground strip. The ground strip is connected to the other ground strip by a jumper wire where the power supply ground is connected. There is also have a ,1uF cap across the breadboard power strips and a 470uF cap across the power strips.
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By PuceBaboon
#74434 perigalacticon,

You're on the right track with the caps, but even more importantly (as @destroyedlolo says) , don't use breadboard for anything medium-to-long term; the connections are just too unreliable. Grab yourself some strip-board a soldering iron and put it together more permanently.

@Rudi gives good advice on the caps ...you have the right idea, but they're in the wrong place. I don't see any caps close to your on-bread-board regulator and the 470uf seems to be across the 5v rail, with only a single ceramic across the 3v3. I usually put a discrete 470uf and a 0.1uf as close as possible to the ESP module and, where I have sensors or LEDs on flying leads at anything more than 15cm/6" from the module, add 0.1uf across the supply leads (not the GPIOs) to those devices, too.

If you have a really noisy environment (which you obviously do) you can also add 0.1uf on the remote ends of those supply leads and reverse-biased, fast Schottky diodes between your data (GPIO) lines,, +ve and ground, too. All of this will reduce the "antenna" effect of your long leads (remember, it's not just the on/off switching current, but also those long wires picking up the RF from your ESP modules, too).

On the software side, if you have delays in your code, it usually helps if you throw in a few calls to yield() (I just wrap delay() into a function which calls yield() before it calls delay()). The same goes for long, compute intensive routines ...throw in a yield() here and there to keep the RF housekeeping happy.

And yes, like others here, I do have mains and battery powered modules which have run for months (batt) and years (mains) without problems. Some of the modules I have with Theo's TASMOTA software are in built-in boxes and are only ever updated using OTA.

Good luck with your projects!

-John-
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By rudy
#74443
perigalacticon wrote:There is a ceramic .1uF cap with one lead in the ESP01 VCC breadboard 'pin strip' and one lead in the ground strip. The ground strip is connected to the other ground strip by a jumper wire where the power supply ground is connected. There is also have a ,1uF cap across the breadboard power strips and a 470uF cap across the power strips.

You still don't get it. There is wire between the caps and the ESP8266. It is not a superconductor. It has impedance.

The Capacitors you are using has wire. Compare your 0.1uF cap to surface mount caps. No wire. That 0.1 cap is ineffective. The electrolytic cap likely has too much inductance to help.

Take a high quality 100uF cap and solder it onto the adapter board you have the ESP module plugged into. It would be better if it were soldered onto the ESP module. The leads should be as short as possible.

Your regulator should be as close to the module as you can arrange it. The caps are great but you need the regulator to also be able to respond to the fluctuations in current in order to keep the voltage steady.

I have about half a dozen ESP modules on breadboards and they work fine. But I have the regulation and filtering caps on the modules. (using ESP-12).