ESP8266 or ESP-01
There are a lot of different modules ESP-NN. In this tutorial we will use the ESP-01 which is by far the cheapest (1,5€). It only exposes two io pins but we only need 1 or 2 depending if we want to have an additional sleep timer for shutting down the lamp.
FTDI to ESP-01
There are several ways to connect the FTDI with the ESP.
The most basic is the following.
Apart from the obvious GND, VCC, TX and RX the only extra pin that is used is the GPIO0.
It is pulled down to GND to enable firmware upload.
The more advanced way will follow in the next few weeks ...