Recently, the development of a tiny chip called the ESP8266 has made it possible to interface any type of microcontroller to a Wi-Fi AP. The ESP8266 is a low-cost tiny Wi-Fi chip having fully built-in TCP/IP stack and a 32-bit microcontroller unit. This chip, produced by Shanghai based Chinese manufacturer Espressif System, is IEEE 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi compatible with on-chip program and data memory, and general purpose input-output ports. Several manufacturers have incorporated the ESP8266 chip in their hardware products (e.g. ESP-xx, NodeMCU etc) and offer these products as a means of connecting a microcontroller system such as the Android, PIC microcontroller or others to a Wi-Fi. The ESP8266 is a low-power chip and costs only a few Dollars.

ESP8266 and MicroPython – Coding Cool Stuff is an introduction to the ESP8266 chip and describes the features of this chip and shows how various firmware and programming languages such as the MicroPython can be uploaded to the chip. The main aim of the book is to teach the readers how to use the MicroPython programming language on ESP8266 based hardware, especially on the NodeMCU.

Several interesting and useful projects are given in the e-book (pdf) to show how to use the MicroPython in NodeMCU type ESP8266 hardware:

• Project “What shall I wear today?”: You will be developing a weather information system using a NodeMCU development board together with a Text-to-Speech processor module.
• Project “The Temperature and Humidity on the Cloud”: You will be developing a system that will get the ambient temperature and humidity using a sensor and then store this data on the cloud so that it can be accessed from anywhere.
• Project “Remote Web Based Control”: You will be developing a system that will remotely control two LEDs connected to a NodeMCU development board using an HTTP Web Server application.