I didn’t have a ton of time to tinker when I got home, but I did play a tiny bit more with the WeMos D1 R2. I got it mounted on an old breadboard that I had previously used for Arduino experiments, and then tried reflashing it with new, fresh NodeMCU firmware that I built on the cloud. That did not result in success, but I’m willing to bet that was because of something stupid I did, although what precisely that may have been is still a mystery to me. But I then dusted off some old “clock” code that I wrote for the Arduino, and tried a quick port to the WeMos. Several of the libraries that I used on the Arduino (RTClib and TimerOne) were not supported on the ESP8266, so for the moment it’s not a real time clock: it just counts in seconds, and uses the Ticker library instead. But in the span of fifteen minutes that I eeked out just before bed, I got it working:

Pardon the poor quality snapshot against all the clutter on my desk.

So far, I’m having fun with the WeMos. I will probably a sketch which uses the WiFi next, and perhaps the MQTT framework.