ESP8266 Community Forum

I know. It depends.

Coming from an Arduino background (mostly cheap Pro Minis from EBay), the integrated wifi capability of the ESP8266 has my full attention, but I'm a little put off by how the ESP-01 exposes so few GPIO pins. Still, the ESP-01 offers a cheap introduction to the platform.

It looks like the only models that offer 0.1" pin spacing are the ESP-0[125]. Are there any gotchas or advantages to the ESP-0[25] compared to the ESP-01?

Not to wear my n00biness on my shoulder, but I found this blog entry and this esp8266.com wiki page helped clear my brain fog.

I had made the mistake of thinking that the ESP-01 only exposed a single GPIO pin. In fact, it exposes three. [Actually, it looks like four GPIO pins are exposed.*] Even that is enough for my purposes. The ESP-201 looks very interesting. If a manufacturer would either offer a kit with unsoldered headers (like some of the Arduino Pro Minis sold on EBay), or produced an ESP-201 with the serial header soldered onto the top of the board, I'd be game. My desoldering skills are really lacking, and the chances of my successfully desoldering a four-pin header would be about 50-50.

For now, the ESP-01 will do...and I may buy a few ESP-201 and tempt fate with my desoldering.

Still spinning from the realization the there is an Arduino-ish board with built in wifi and a far more powerful processor for around $3.

[* This comes from Neil Kolban's The ESP8266 Book, page 87.]

It is really depend of your application/project.
Even with ESP-01, you can add I2C GPIO Expander such MCP23017, and get 16 more GPIOs.
Maybe you should described in more details what you wish to do ...

My opinion (and is just that) is to use the ESP-12 with the breakout boards. My reasoning is that I get more GPIOs plus an ADC. I also use one of the GPIOs (GPIO2) for debugging as it is the output pin for UART1. But then as Martin says, your goals are everything. Given the relatively cheap price of the devices, I'd suggest get a couple of each and see what you like. Be sure and get a couple as the rate of frying them when you are new is quite high.

Again ... this is 100% opinion.

Neil