A Beginner's Guide to the ESP8266 (2017)

I wrote a Beginner's Guide to Arduino that seems to be very popular, so I decided to create a follow-up: A Beginner's Guide to the ESP8266. What is an ESP8266? A short overview of what an ESP8266 is, and what you can do with it. Deciding on what board to buy: There's loads of different ESP8266 available these days, finding the one that's best for you can be hard. The ESP8266 as a microcontroller: the ESP8266 can be used as a normal microcontroller, just like an Arduino. Setting up a Wi-Fi connection: That's probably why you're reading this, right? Name resolution: Find the ESP8266 on your local network using mDNS. Setting up a simple web server: This enables you to add web pages to the ESP8266, and browse them from your computer or phone. The ESP8266 is a System on a Chip, manufactured by the Chinese company Espressif. The ESP8266 chip itself has 17 GPIO pins, but 6 of these pins are used for communication with the on-board flash memory chip.