From the great minds behind the NodeMCU Lua interpreter for the ESP8266 comes a proper dev board for the WiFi platform of 2015. They are calling it, the NodeMCU-devkit, and it’s a reasonable, cheap, and breadboardable breakout board for the ESP8266.
The version of ESP8266 used in this project is the ESP-12, the newer, fancier model with RF shielding, a questionable FCC logo, and every single one of the GPIOs exposed on castellated connectors. The rest of the board is a USB to serial converter (the CH340G – probably the least expensive USB to serial chip out there), a few passives, and a USB micro connector. It’s simple, cheap, and open source. You can’t do better than that.
This dev board is explicitly created to work with the NodeMCU firmware, a Lua-based firmware for the ESP. already we’ve seen some projects make the Hackaday front page with this firmware. Sure, it’s just a garage door opener, but that’s very excellent for a chip that’s only a few months old.
Thanks [Baboon] for the tip.