ESP8266 Community Forum

I'm going to integrate ESP with my board and I have a few questions to You:

First of all, I saw that there is possible to buy a bare chip without any board. I wonder if I integrate the chip, the flash and the rest of components with my board I will be able to flash the chip through UART from my PC using Flash Download Tools. Is there any built in bootloader like in STMs?

The next step is to eliminate PC from the equation. I would like flash ESP using other microcontroller from my project. Do you know anything about any documentation, how flashing process looks like? Any pieces of information will be useful.

I do not know about bare ESP chips, but flashing ESP modules from Arduino boards is quite popular.

It should be possible, although lot of work to create your own bootloader tool. Unlike STM32, ESP uploading protocol is not a DFU bootloader. It has it's own protocol, which is not well documented, but you can rely on existing tools to do some kind of reverse-engineering, and maybe with help of the tool's authors.
Here are 2 of those tools :
https://github.com/themadinventor/esptool
https://github.com/igrr/esptool-ck

Thank you for your info. It is as I thought. It is very little known about ESP flashing procedure. I've already seen the first repo, however I haven't seen the second one which looks better than the first one.
I will look into it.