The ESP8266 is a System on Chip (SoC), manufactured by the Chinese company Espressif. The central processor is a Tensilica L106 32-bit microcontroller unit (MCU) and a Wi-Fi transceiver. It has 11 GPIO pins and an analog input also. Note that the ESP8266 chip itself has 17 GPIO pins, but 6 of these pins (6-11) are used for communication with the on-board flash memory chip.
There are many different modules available, standalone modules like the ESP-xx series by AI Thinker, or complete development boards like the NodeMCU DevKit or the WeMos D1. Different boards may have different pins broken out, have different Wi-Fi antennas, or a different amount of flash memory on board.
ESP8266 Variant Local Pages
Software Libraries
- ESP8266 Arduino Library Core Documentation – Welcome to ESP8266 Arduino Core’s documentation!
- ESP8266 RTOS SDK Programming Reference
Other ESP8266 Online Documentation
- ESPRESSIF – The company that created the chips.
ESP8266EX Datasheet – ESP8266 medium-level data
- Hardware Design Guidelines
- Low-Power Solutions
- Technical Reference – ESP8266 low-level hardware/software data
- Typical Module Schematic (PDF)
PlatformIO Development
- PlatformIO – PlatformIO is a cross-platform, cross-architecture, multiple framework, professional tool for embedded systems engineers and for software developers who write applications for embedded products. Their Github is here.
Other Project Examples
- ESP8266 “hackster.io” projects