These are really nice $5 chips with Wifi programmable with the Arduino toolset. Tons of IoT people use these to integrate various instrumentation and control into their houses or science projects. For instance, you can hook one up to a temperature sensor and a relay and control your heater. There are probably millions of these installed, hooked up to important hardware. So this makes wardriving fun again, I guess, if not destructive.

Just to give you some idea of how easy these are to use: In 20 mins with a small breadboard, a few Dupont wires, a Nodemcu ESP8266, a DHT22 with a pull up resister I've got a desk temperature sensor.

Add: https://esphome.io/

... and it talks MQTT and connects straight into Home Assistant.

Hmm. Actually have all of that except the esp on hand

No soldering needed?

Yes, no soldering. Here's an example of the sort of thing that is sat on my desk:

https://lastminuteengineers.com/esp8266-dht11-dht22-web-serv...

If a NodeMCU board is too big for you then an ESP 01S is smaller and even cheaper. Less I/O options though but very useful. Needs a writer and wires to program. You can get one with a relay that is capable of switching 16A.

https://frenck.dev/diy-smart-doorbell-for-just-2-dollar/ - here's an example of a project. $2 is a bit ambitious I spend £7 for two of them on Amazon. That's two ESP-01S and two relays!

I don't do Arduino. esphome is a lot easier for me. You use pip to get the thing installed under your user account. Write a .yaml file which is largely copy and paste from examples and then install it through a USB cable the first time and then over the air after that.

Thank you, I've got software expertise but no hardware at all, I've been looking for something like this.

The ESP 01S is particularly good once you get to grips with writing to them because you can power them from any old phone charger that spits out 5V. You simply cut off the plug, look for the wire with the white stripe on it to determine polarity, strip the ends and screw into the relay block.

Be prepared to wave goodbye to your spare time and seriously consider a separate VLAN/SSID for these things.

Heh, I came across your site last week, so thank you! (Oh, maybe it's not your site)

I got the DHT22 to work at 3.3V. But an old 1-Wire DS18B20 I have is very finicky. The pullup needs to be 500-800 ohms. Any experience with 1-wire at 3.3V? (Parasitic power mode). Worked great on a 5V nano.

How do you power them conveniently though?

I can wrap my head around doing the soldering.

But power means either power adapter or battery?

If I’m doing power I might as well use a raspberry.

I tend to power my devices via a simple USB phone-charger.

Like the parent I have a few temperature/humidity sensors dotted around the house. Using a PI would be overkill and I'd have to keep the system packages up to date, worry about failing storage-device, etc.

Yep. Most have a micro-USB connector which supplies power, and handles uploading/logging. So when you're done debugging, you just need a phone charger with a long enough cable.

>simple USB phone-charger.

Damn. Was hoping that isn't the answer.

Phone chargers everywhere are ugly & in the way

>I'd have to keep the system packages up to date, worry about failing storage-device, etc.

Fair point

It is a WiFi enabled microcontroller locally designed and produced in china with a "100 million units sold" target. It is widely used by the makers community and by many new "smart" products. I would say that this has a really large scale impact and a lot of people will need to update the firmware.

Anything. From things like nanny cams in a teddy bear that can be remotely hacked. (although more likely that they just had an easy to guess password if they had one at all or other more common vulnerabilities) to smart traffic lights. p.s. regarding the nanny cams: I wish I was making this up: https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2018/02/21/50000...

> some kind of IoT chips? can't tell what the real world impact of this is.

This is what virtually every WiFi toaster around uses now. If you see a wifi device below $20, it is almost certain that it will be Esp32 inside

The single most popular IoT chips / network connected microcontrollers (at least among hobbyists).

AFAIK they are largely used in home-automation systems, especially home-made ones due to their low price, good enough specs and availability on resellers like AliExpress

Rain Bird uses them in their WiFi enabled Sprinkler Control Systems.

Looks like the pool on the roof might have a leak.

I have some sort of Espessif wifi controller in a smart bulb.

They are used everywhere in IOT.