Espressif’s ESP8266 is among the most integrated WiFi chips in the industry; it integrates the antenna switches, RF balun, power amplifier, low noise receive amplifier, filters, power management modules, it requires minimal external circuitry, and the entire solution, including front-end module, is designed to occupy minimal PCB area.
The ESP8266 also integrates an enhanced version of Tensilica’s L106 Diamond series 32-bit processor, with on-chip SRAM, besides the Wi-Fi functionalities.
The ESP8266 is the base for several ESP modules some of them will be introduced here.
The ESP8266 is RoHS-conform and has all required certificates, as FCC & CE. Therefore, no restrictions for its use in applications will be expected.
NodeMCU is an open source IoT platform. It uses the Lua scripting language. It is based on the eLua project, and built on the ESP8266 SDK 0.9.5. It includes firmware which runs on the ESP8266 and hardware which is based on the ESP-12 module.
A few lines of Lua are sufficant to build a web server or client, a MQTT publisher or subcriber or connecting peripherals. This kind of applications are in focus here.