Review on 🔌 SparkFun ESP8266 Thing Development Board by Daniel Ortiz

This is my first development for ESP8266. I'm a programmer by trade, but I'm new to microcontrollers in general. The ESP8266 is a really amazing and cheap chip for what it does: the fully integrated WiFi stack is pretty easy to use. I've decided to forego the Arduino libraries and program with a non-OS vendor's SDK. Most, but not all, are open source and easy to set up and use. The SDK itself has an OK Help PDF on the manufacturer's website, and there is a thriving community dedicated to the chip, although I still found it difficult at times to post tutorials or overview-style descriptions at a higher level than a simple one Get a list of features. signatures. However, the non-OS SDK suffers from poor design; If you're a professional programmer, you'll probably roll your eyes at some of your design decisions. ). However, in hindsight I regret buying this particular board due to the small amount of flash memory (the supplied chip is only 500kb). In fact, it's so small that you can no longer flash the original ESP8266 firmware onto the device as the latest versions are too big. Instead I would go for one with more memory so I can flash over the air (you need enough for the program size times two). When I felt more confident with my surface soldering I might try swapping out the flash chip.