You may need the CP2102 driver available from the Silabs website. It is free and easy to install. This board features the ESP8266 ESP-12F but has all of its pins broken out. This enables the ESP8266 to be breadboard compatible. It also has an integrated micro-usb port which makes powering and programming the chip far easier compared to having to use a usb-to-serial adapter. The NodeMcu firmware can be loaded easily if you want to develop programs in Lua. It is also compatible when other leading micro-controller development platforms. This board has a female Micro-USB port on the board for power and program uploading. This port type is very common on many consumer electronics and on smartphones. Flashing this device is easy. To flash, just hold the flash button and perform the flash using firmware programming software.