Unfortunately, the original ESP8266 boards weren’t the friendliest things to prototype with. Their awkward two-row connector is mechanically stronger than an inline solution — but the geometry of most breadboards means that DIL parts with less than 300mil separation can’t be easily breadboarded. Plus, the ESP8266 uses an inexpensive but obscure Cadence Tensilica processor — not supported by most enthusiasts’ toolchains. Sure would be nice if someone were to bake an ESP8266 into an Arduino and write the libraries.<\/p>\n
Seems like SparkFun had the same idea. Their “ESP8266 Thing<\/a>” is essentially a high-powered Arduino-compatible CPU attached to a ESP8266 module. With the libraries and examples provided, it’s reasonably easy to get up and running with a webserver.<\/p>\n The SparkFun ESP8266 Thing Dev Board<\/p><\/div>\n After setting up the Thing<\/a> (Note: you need to short GPIO0 to ground in order to get it to program), I modified a temperature and humidity webserver<\/a> from Adafruit <\/a>to create a webserver that could turn on an LED when the \/on page was read, and turn it off when the \/off page was read. It’s straightforward enough to modify this to, for example, control A\/C outlets.<\/p>\n Here’s the sketch<\/a>.<\/p>\n $16 to connect a gadget to the ‘Net, almost effortlessly. I love living in the future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" For $16, the SparkFun ESP8266 Thing can connect your gadget to WiFi. Continue reading ![\"\"](\"https:\/\/cdn.sparkfun.com\/\/assets\/parts\/1\/1\/1\/9\/7\/13711-01.jpg\" "\\"I")