This morning I’m still drinking coffee and waking up, but I was pointed at “the ESP8266 wiki”, which appears to be this Wiki page. Bookmarked mostly so I can quickly find it again. But it has some good information. If I haven’t teased you enough with this experimentation, consider these features of the ESP8266:

• It’s a wireless SoC
• It has GPIO, I2C, ADC, SPI, PWM and some more
• It’s running at 80MHz
• 64KBytes of instruction RAM
• 96KBytes of data RAM
• 64KBytes boot ROM
• It has a Winbond W25Q40BVNIG SPI flash
• It’s a RISC architecture
• The core is a 106micro Diamond Standard core (LX3) made by Tensilica
• The ESP8266 chip is made by Espressif
• Modules bearing this chip are made by various manufacturers

And most importantly, you can get modules starting for as low as $3. You can get modules with the same chipset, more pins and USB for just $8.70 (plus shipping) (thanks MicroHex for suggesting it). And now, with the ability to program them from the Arduino environment? I’m definitely going to be experimenting with them.