Thunderstorm triggering button press? So I recently built a small IFTT powered button using an ESP8266 for my boys to play with. Tonight during an intense Thunderstorm, I kept getting alerts that it had been pressed. They weren't in the basement at all. Then I realized, giant crack of lightening === SMS message. 

Now I don't think this has anything to do with the button mechanism itself, but the shoddy way I hooked it up, and stuffed it into an enclosure. I'm just curious - is this possible? Could some sort of static electricity from a few nearby lightening strikes do something that would send a 'high' signal to the GPIO Pin on my Espee? I had to use a pull up resistor, and I feel like there's probably a few bare-ish wires in there, but nothing touching, or even close enough to 'arc'. Am I crazy?
You aren't crazy. I had a similar thing happen when an external hot-water system turned on at midnight (someone was having a shower) and one of my systems detected input unexpectedly (and rang a bell right next to my ear while I was trying to sleep). 

My solution was to have something like this:



The diodes clamp the input to acceptable ranges, and R1 is a current limit for the diodes. R2 and C1 are a filter that slows down the incoming signal (and thus eliminates sudden spikes). R3 is a pull-up resistor. In my case I had active-low. If you have active-high you could use a pull-down resistor instead.

Also see https://arduino.stackexchange.com/a/13128/10794

Further reference material:


10 Ways to Destroy An Arduino
Protection
Microcontroller Input Protection Techniques