I have been using the ESP8266 for a couple of months now, but always with NodeMCU and Lua.
I have never used Arduino before, not in any form whatsoever, but I was tempted to try it because of the huge amount of available libraries. I was specifically interested in receiving 433 MHz signals, which is currently not supported by Lua/NodeMCU. Even though it's been a very long time since I coded C, I do enjoy it and it's not alien to me, so I was tempted to try the ESP8266 Arduino interface.
I am absolutely delighted to say that my first experiments with rc-switch have worked as well or better than I expected, everything is working fine and all my signals are getting decoded correctly. Yay! Which is quite unexpected, as I certainly don't have much of an idea of what I'm doing.
For instance, is there no makefile involved in building a sketch/project? The sketch I ran had two files, but they wouldn't play well initially, in the end I'm not quite sure what I did, a bit of trying to compile each file separately, a bit of manual file deletions behind its back, in the end it built and worked fine, just don't ask me how...
My other main question is -
How does the Arduino way of working compare to the ESP idiom and to Lua? I see a lot of delay() loops - do they really just sit and busy-wait? Is there an equivalent of the timer triggers used by NodeMCU, and how do these correspond the "interrupts" mentioned in Arduino parlance? In other words any good tutorial information beyond the initial "how to set up a system", yeah, I sort of got that, I need a bit more now...
Ultimately, I'd like to be able to port some of these ideas to the ESP environment and to NodeMCU/Lua, but for now I'll be happy to spend the next while just learning the Arduino way.
Any pointers hints links info most welcome...
Really great asset this Arduino stuff.
Cheers!