As usual I’ll be using a NodeMCU board (I really did order a lot of them) which uses an ESP8266, but there’s no reason this would be difficult to achieve on an Arduino-based device.

At the time I thought it was great – the emulator and development boards were good, and I could add a microcontroller permanently to a project for a dollar. Then the ESP8266 came out.

It's also got fantastic documentation, some of the clearest I've ever seen in a single-chip microcontroller, and a nice SDK which feels like what the ESP8266's wants to be once it's grown up.

The ESP8266 chip includes a 32-bit RISC microprocessor core running at 80 or 160 MHz, 80 KiB of user-data RAM, and support for several expansion interfaces, such as 17 GPIO pins, SPI, and UART.