Programming the ESP8266 is a little difficult to get off the ground with, but once you do, things are very easy. There are a few options for building the toolchain on Linux and OSX, plus some ...

If you want to get started with motion sensors and the like, ESPHome makes it incredibly easy to build your own sensors.

These days, everything’s in the cloud. [Sebastian] from [Hacking Beaver] wondered if he could make a WiFi bug that was small and cheap besides. Enter the ESP8266 and some programming wizardry.