The processor core, called “L106” by Espressif, is based on Tensilica’s Diamond Standard 106Micro 32-bit processor controller core and runs at 80 MHz (or overclocked to 160 MHz).
It provides capabilities for 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi (802.11 b/g/n, supporting WPA/WPA2), general-purpose input/output (16 GPIO), Inter-Integrated Circuit (I☬), analog-to-digital conversion (10-bit ADC), Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI), I²S interfaces with DMA (sharing pins with GPIO), UART (on dedicated pins, plus a transmit-only UART can be enabled on GPIO2), and pulse-width modulation (PWM). The ESP8266 series presently includes the ESP8266EX and ESP8285 chips.ĮSP8266EX (simply referred to as ESP8266) is a system-on-chip (SoC) which integrates a 32-bit Tensilica microcontroller, standard digital peripheral interfaces, antenna switches, RF balun, power amplifier, low noise receive amplifier, filters and power management modules into a small package. The ESP8266 series, or family, of Wi-Fi chips is produced by Espressif Systems, a fabless semiconductor company operating out of Shanghai, China. The term “NodeMCU” by default refers to the firmware rather than the dev kits. It includes firmware which runs on the ESP8266 Wi-Fi SoC from Espressif Systems, and hardware which is based on the ESP-12 module. Use of ESP8266 as just a Serial-to-WiFi bridge with arduino is most common mistake newbies do. ESP8266 comes in many variants most popular is ESP-12 and ESP-01.
ESP8266 is most popular development board.
In this tutorial we focus only on GPIO pins of ESP8266 and How to use efficiently.