Sharing my enthusiasm too!

[dhouston]

Dave,
What is your preferred platform for the ESP?

At this point it looks like Erel is planning to support it so I'm waiting to see where that goes. I have a project that involves an Arduino Mini Pro plus ESP plus HC-05 Bluetooth and it now looks like I'll be able to support all using B4R.

BTW, this book is an excellent resource for the ESP...
http://neilkolban.com/tech/esp8266/

[ardhuru]

Right, that makes sense.

If your project requires an ESP as well as Bluetooth, you might want to hold on the final design and migrate it to the expected-soon ESP32, which supports Wifi as well as BLE.

I'm wondering, why use an Arduino at all? Do you need more I/Os than what the ESP8266 12E has?

I'd stumbled across Neils book a few days back. Its absolutely amazing, isn't it? Quite an exhaustive resource.

[dhouston]

I'm wondering, why use an Arduino at all? Do you need more I/Os than what the ESP8266 12E has?

It's a DIY project and the Arduino Mini Pro is easier for end users to handle. WiFi & Bluetooth are optional and function only as wireless to serial interfaces. It's actually two projects that can share most of the code - one needs all of the pins on the Arduino. And the Arduino Mini Pro has an onboard 5V LDO allowing more flexibility in providing power.

Finally, I'm 74 and in poor health so I dislike delays.