Day 5 - Section 1 - Introduction to NodeMCU: What is NodeMCU?

Day 5 - Section 1 - Introduction to NodeMCU

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After the completion of this section the students will be able to:

state what is the NodeMCU board
describe and analyze the applications of NodeMCU board and ESP8266 chip
distinguish the basic elements of Arduino IDE
setup the Arduino IDE to their computers based on NodeMCU settings

What is NodeMCU?

The NodeMCU (Node MicroController Unit) is an open source software and hardware development environment that is built around a very inexpensive System-on-a-Chip (SoC) called the ESP8266. The ESP8266, designed and manufactured by Espressif Systems, contains all crucial elements of the modern computer: CPU, RAM, networking (wifi), and even a modern operating system and SDK. When purchased at bulk, the ESP8266 chip costs only $2 USD a piece. That makes it an excellent choice for IoT projects of all kinds.

Through its pins we can read inputs - light on a sensor, a finger on a button, or a Twitter message -and turn them into an output - activating a motor, turning on an LED, publishing something online. It has also WiFi capabilities, so we can control it wirelessly and make it work on a remote installation easily! We can tell our board what to do by sending a set of instructions to the microcontroller on the board. To do so we can use the the Arduino Software (IDE).