If I get an ESP8266, I can have something that run code, sit on my home network wirelessly and use it to do things like report on sensor inputs? Am I missing some larger expense that would be required as this seems very cheap compared to other options I've seen.
I have done exactly this, it sends values to an MQTT server on my NAS every second or so, which the NAS then adds to Graphite and plots them in Grafana. It also has some logic to act on these values and send commands back, like turning lights on and off, etc.
I feel like this comment could be turned into a popular blog post.
https://github.com/skorokithakis/ArduiRC
I'll write up the details, but this is a good chunk of it.
I'm pretty disheartened, I'll try some more and either succeed or go back to an Arduino over serial... Do you have any experience with making it not crash?
Good luck!
By the way, if you don't want to keep checking the comments, you can follow me on Twitter at @stavros and experience my frustration first-hand. I'll be posting about it there.
Just be careful not to connect the 5V VCC to the ESP8266, it will probably kill it.
You need to run it on 3.3v which means 3.3v versions of your sensore or external level shifting. You've got limited IO compared to, say, Arduino.
But of you've got 3.3v sensors - yeah - all you need is an ESP8266 and some way of providing 3.3v. (And probably some pulldown/up resistors and decoupling caps...)