I'd love to try Spark - Photon seems to be out of stock at the moment though.
In the last couple of weeks I've been dabbling with Arduino Uno and Nano and have been very impressed by how plug-and-play everything is.
But I've been super-impressed with the ESP8266. A thumbnail-sized wonder which has a 32-bit CPU, GPIO pins, wi-fi, more RAM than the usual Atmels, costs peanuts ($5) and is available worldwide on ebay and other sources. Now that it has both the Arduino IDE and the nodemcu Lua environment, this little thing is poised to take off. I just finished wiring up a temp sensor to the 8266 using the Arduino IDE. Now I have a tiny temperature web-service on my wi-fi network, responding to a Bonjour/mdns name and it took all of half an hour.
In the last couple of weeks I've been dabbling with Arduino Uno and Nano and have been very impressed by how plug-and-play everything is.
But I've been super-impressed with the ESP8266. A thumbnail-sized wonder which has a 32-bit CPU, GPIO pins, wi-fi, more RAM than the usual Atmels, costs peanuts ($5) and is available worldwide on ebay and other sources. Now that it has both the Arduino IDE and the nodemcu Lua environment, this little thing is poised to take off. I just finished wiring up a temp sensor to the 8266 using the Arduino IDE. Now I have a tiny temperature web-service on my wi-fi network, responding to a Bonjour/mdns name and it took all of half an hour.