Just two resistors works or three if you want deep sleep. Some people recommend pulling up&#x2F;down some of the other pins, but it&#x27;s always worked fine for me to leave them floating. I tend to do those with solder bridges instead of wires, so it doesn&#x27;t get too messy. I also usually put an LDO regulator on the power input since I have more 5V supplies on hand and I skip the smoothing cap. The output from the regulators I use is plenty smooth and it works OK.<p>The WeMos is infinitely easier, especially because it has the FTDI chip built in, but it&#x27;s not terrible to use the bare modules. I got on the ESP8266 bandwagon fairly early, so I got used to working with the bare modules since they were all I could get.