It was an issue with power supply. When booted using power from the USB, it has issues as described. Most pins go high at some point on boot. When booted with power from the permanent power supply, it works fine.

Inq720: "According to this chart https://randomnerdtutorials.com/esp8266 ... nce-gpios/ three of the SPI pins aren't specified to be HIGH at boot. (12, 13, 14) I don't recall what are their default setting, but you can use a pull down resistor on the one you want and shouldn't affect the boot proces...

Liaifat85: “Kindly check the power supply. It's possible that the power supply is not giving sufficient voltage and current to the ESP and the motor controller.” Thank you. I am new to this forum and don’t see a way to respond directly to each response so have pasted yours for reference. I was using...

I have a design I am working on using the nodeMCU ESP8266 board and a BTS 7960 motor controller (IBT_2). The BTS 7960 is controlled by two PWM pins for forward/reverse and one common enable pin to connect to the two enable contacts. To cause rotation, voltage is applied to enable, then a (PWM varied...