ESP8266 Community Forum

Being an Arduino user for several years, I'm comfortable with it and the Arduino IDE environment. Now, with the blossoming of the ESP8266 devices I'm in a quandry as to whether or not I should take on the tasks of learning a new IDE (Lua Loader or ESPlorer) and learning some LUA so I can then be able to be Arduino free for projects using wifi. Or if it is better, simpler, easier on my head and time to stick with C++ and an Arduino with an attached ESP8266.

Currently most of my projects will not involve wifi; an Arduino will suffice. But I can sense that wifi capability may be tempting to use when perhaps not being necessary. A project that is near the top of my list will incorporate wifi. That project is home monitoring. I want to build a system that will allow me to control things when away from home and, most importantly, to be notified of certain events that might occur within our home when away.

What are you thoughts? Thanks - Scotty

See, it just happened. Just 10 minutes after writing the above lines in this post I was working on another project involving displaying the temperature of two sensors, mulling over what display to use. It then occurred to me that if incorporating wifi, I could use Thingspeak and my iphone in lieu of a hardware display.

You can program the ESP8266 modules just like an arduino use the arduino IDE.

It will compile and upload sketches directly to the esp module. I started with lua on the esp but as soon as I got the arduino environment set up I really have never looked back.

Make sure you have the latest version of arduino and head over to the
https://github.com/esp8266/Arduino


Scroll down and there will be installation instructions.

I used the boards manager and the staging release link.

scottyjr wrote:

scottyjr wrote:See, it just happened. Just 10 minutes after writing the above lines in this post I was working on another project involving displaying the temperature of two sensors, mulling over what display to use. It then occurred to me that if incorporating wifi, I could use Thingspeak and my iphone in lieu of a hardware display.

Hi, not my work, but a good example http://www.arduinesp.com/thingspeak to give you an idea of how easy it is. Now you need to start planning your next project.

Brrrr Arduino...