This is probably one of the most popular modules, although it is by far not the most convenient one. With its small form factor (24.75mm x 14.5mm) it fits nicely into any enclosure. Two GPIO pins are led out and can be used to control periphery. With proper wiring and a serial-to-usb adapter you can also easily flash alternatives firmwares on it. By default it comes with one of the different versions of the AT firmware which allows you to use it in combination with an Arduino. One of the biggest problems of this module is the placement of the pin posts which makes it impossible to plug it directly into a bread board for prototyping: the two rows of posts are so close to each other that you would get a short-cirtcuit. However you can still use this module on a breadboard: either build a bread-board adapter or use female-to-male dupont wires to wire the module to your bread-board.
Update: There are now also versions of the ESP-01 available with 1MB Flash, compared to the earlier 512MB

ESP8266 ESP-01 module

ESP8266 ESP-12 plus self made bread board adapter (thx to Andifor the picture)

There is also an almost-ready breadboard adapter available here.
Thanks to its good availability and the rich access to the chip pins it is also widely used for aggregated modules, such as the test board I describe later in this post or the first version of the NodeMCU module. If you are planning to use the ESP8266 as a stand alone node the chances are good you will end up with this module in one way or the other.

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ESP-201

ESP8266 ESP-201 with pin-out description

Test Board

NodeMCU module V1.0

All in all, this is the long awaited development board that you want to have and play with. The price is slightly higher than with the other boards, starting from around $8 for a potential clone, but it is totally worth it because you are saving all the additional hardware like serial-to-usb converter.

New improved version of the NodeMCU V1.0. Now fits very nicely on a breadboard and also the Serial-To-USB converter works very well.

Applications/ Development Kits

docker run hello-world

2. Create the docker container

If you didn’t have git before starting this walkthrough you will have now: boot2docker should have installed it. That’s why you can now execute

git clone https://github.com/squix78/esp8266-docker-buildbox.git
cd esp8266-docker-buildbox/
docker build -t local/buildbox .

This last step might take a while (or two): in my case it took almost 20 minutes. But the good thing is that you’ll only have to do it once.

3. Run the docker container and compile your first firmware

Now it’s time to start the container:

docker run -i -t local/buildbox /bin/bash

su - esp8266
cd source-code-examples/blinky/
make

Note: Now you’d still have to get the images somehow to your ESP8266. I will update this post shortly and describe how you can do that…

1. Add a wire between GPIO0 pin and the Ground pin (GND)
2. Now reset the module be quickly connecting the RST pin to the GND pin (in my case the blue LED flashes quickly)

1. Download the esptool.py from here.
2. Make it executable and run it with ./esptool.py –help. On my Mac OS X machine I got an error, that the serial library is nowhere to be found. Because of this I had to

   1. brew install python

   2. pip install pyserial
      

   3. make sure that you will use the python installed by brew
3. Download the lua firmware from here (the nodemcu_512k.bin file)
4. Find out the port your FTDI controller or your Seeeduino is connected to. In my case I used the Arduino IDE to find the port and make sure no console is currently connected to the Arduino
5. Replace tty.usbserial-A901LKQM with your actual com-port

   esptool.py --port /dev/tty.usbserial-A901LKQM write_flash 0x000000 nodemcu_512k.bin

6. Remove the connection between GPIO0 and GND
7. Reset the module again by connecting RST quickly to GND

Running Lua examples on the module

1. Open a serial console and connect it with your Arduino or FTDI controller. I opened the console in the Arduino IDE and set the baud rate to 9600
2. Run enter this Lua code into the console (you may have to enter it line by line):

   print(wifi.sta.getip())
   --0.0.0.0
   wifi.setmode(wifi.STATION)
   wifi.sta.config("SSID","password")
   print(wifi.sta.getip())
   --192.168.18.110
   

3. Run more examples from here

Update 2015-01-04

• How to use the esptool to write firmware
• esptool for flashing firmware
• Lua Examples
• Available commands

ESP8266 Serial Port WIFI