Description
ESP8266 is a very popular WiFi enabled microcontroller. Thanks to very attractive price and huge possibilities quickly became a very popular choice - especially in domain of home automation. However bare ESP8266 is a bit tricky for beginners. It requires stable power supply, and sophisticated programming method. Wemos D1 mini solves all those inconveniences. Basically it's very similar to NodeMCU module. The main difference is size. Wemos D1 is smaller, and have newer version of wifi module - 12F. More stable and with a better range.
Wemos D1 module it's a small board with ESP8266-12F. On board there is also USB-UART converter (popular CH340). Because of that, all you need to start programming is simple USB cable.
Wemos D1 provides 9 GPIO ports with PWM, I2C, SPI and 1-Wire support. Thanks to 3.3V LDO module can be powered directly from USB port via microUSB power supply.
They are 3 basic methods to use Wemos. AT commands, LUA programming language with NodeMCU firmware and simplest and our favorite Arduino IDE.