I don't have any trouble flashing or uploading code to an ESP8266/NodeMCU module directly, but I don't want to code the ESP. I would like to keep that to a bare minimum. Isn't there a way of connecting the ESP8266 to the Arduino and then managing WiFi and TCP from within the Arduino code?
Does anyone know a good link for on how to hookup an ESP8266 to an Arduino and which library should be used? I get confused... there are several ESP8266 libraries and a WiFi library specific to the ESP8266 - but I don't want to write my code on the ESP directly.
Maybe it's just that I only see diagrams of the ESP communicating through TX/RX serial connections and I don't understand how TCP works this way.