[mrspeaker]

I have an interest in electronics and would call myself a "maker" (well, I have a growing box filled with various arduinos and microcontrollers)... but after scouring the repo and the website, I can't figure out what this is, or what I could do with it!

What is an "ESP8266 board"? Is that something that is so common it doesn't need explaining? Of course I will google it [and probably buy one], but just pointing out that it's not very clear from the website!

[EDIT: ok, after 10 minutes of googlin', it seems no one will explain what it is - it's just "an esp8266 system on a chip". It must be the first rule of ESP8266 club...]

[jsharf]

Esp8266 is a microcontroller which is incredibly popular in the maker/hacker movement for it's low cost and wifi integration. You can add a relay to this microcontroller and put it on your wifi network and use it to switch appliances on/off from the internet quite easily. If you read hackaday, you'll run into esp8266 projects regularly.

It's a bit harder to get started with than your average arduino project. If you want, you can use the Arduino IDE which hides a lot of the complexities. But the docs from espressif are aimed more at the firmware engineer crowd, so if you want to get serious there's more of a learning curve (IE nvflash partitions, understanding what a bootloader is, etc). Also, you'll probably end up getting into freertos at some point, which further complicates things. But it's a super great module for home projects.

The esp-32 is a newer chip which is similar but adds bluetooth. In general you're better off going with esp-32 nowadays -- it's got a second core as well.

Until recently the only thing missing was USB (though there were bit-banged USB implementations!). But now there's an esp-32 with USB too, so really for the cost, the features are unparalleled.

If you're okay with things not being as polished as the Arduino experience (you might have to learn "real" firmware programming), it's really the best starting choice for your side projects.

[tsjq]

that's a helpful info for newbies. thanks for sharing

[jkubicek]

My info is 5+ years old at this point, but when I last looked into the ESP8266 they were the de-facto easiest/best way to add Wifi to your microcontroller. I have an older ESP8266 board that i used to create a tiny server and tweet stuff for me.

The older board didn't have integrated USB, which made the dev process annoying.

[ajford]

The second result on Google for "ESP8266" is the Wikipedia page, which clearly elaborates what it is.

It's a basic 32bit RISC microcontroller, generally running at 80MHz, with built-in WiFi support. They're often available as modules with either a pin header or castelated edges for surface mounting.

They are supported on the Arduino platform and Platformio.org, as well as some other platforms. They've become quite popular due to their low cost (often available for under $10 at individual quantities) and the fact that they include wifi.

[inamberclad]

I mean, it's another ESP8266 based board with a bunch of GPIO and a relay that looks like it's meant to switch line voltage. It's handy but absolutely not revolutionary.