The ESP8266 WiFi Module sort of snuck up on the hacker community as a "Hrm, what's this delectible little morsel?" item. It looks promising... it's costed nicely... it seems it should be capable... and all the reviews are in - it IS a nice little wifi/microcontroller/Arduino-clone sort of device!

Formally, it's a system-on-a-chip (SOC) that has a TCP/IP stack built in. It's sort taking a wifi controller and squeezing out the extra pins and processing power as a pretty capable Arduino-compatible microcontroller. The ESP8266 can manage all wifi networking, or pass that onto another processor to do. As it is, it come preloaded with an AT command set, so you can use any microcontroller to set all necessary communication parameters through simple serial connections.

To manage this wifi magic, the ESP8266 uses an 80MHz 32-bit processor, with power to spare to drive other functions besides Wifi. It offers 16 GPIO pins, 64kB instruction RAM and 96kB of data RAM besides the 4MB external flash. This means there's little more you have to add to it to have the ESP8266 monitor sensors and toggle I/O lines (using 3.3V logic levels).

Note: The ESP8266 Module is not capable of 5-3V logic shifting and will require an external Logic Level Converter. Please do not power it directly from your 5V development board.

Specifications

• Model ESP-12F AP+STA
• 4MB Flash
• 3.0 ~ 3.6V (recommendation 3.3V)
• 80mA Nominal working current
• FCC / CE / TELEC Certifications
• 802.11 b / g / n
• 2.4GHz-2.5GHz (2400M-2483.5M), PCB trace antenna
• UART / HSPI / I2C / I2S / Ir Remote Control / GPIO / PWM
• 24 x 16mm PCB, 2x8 catellated connections
• Operating temperature: -40°C ~ 125°C

Links

• Huge amount of information on http://www.esp8266.com/ community forum!
• NodeMCU (Lua for ESP8266) webpage with examples and documentation on the Lua framework
• Arduino IDE support for ESP8266

• [Documentation]: CE Certificate of Compliance
• [Data Sheet]: ESP-12 FCC Test Report
• [Data Sheet]: ESP-8266 Datasheet