“A little over a year ago, the ESP8266 WiFi SoC started getting attention and quickly became a little chip of wonder. On a fully self-contained breakout board with this chip, a complete WiFi enabled controller is well under $5! It’s gathered huge interest from the hobbyist world. Since the device first made its appearance, I’ve been watching news on the evolution of its development environments. My play time is very limited at the moment, so I was very excited to learn that a standard C++/Arduino environment is available for this - rather than spending time learning a new SDK, I can just use already familiar environments. More time playing with it, less time stuffing around with compilers, etc.”