The ESP8266 has definitely become the hackers darling device, albeit with a crazy learning curve on the tool chain. Once you get over that initial curve, however, you can do some interesting things with the device pretty quickly.
For this post, I put together a demo of some different things I had been working on, making a strip of NeoPixel LEDs controllable via the ESP8266 using effectively a ReSTful API. In terms of control, what better way to set your lighting mood than to control the lights from your smartwatch - especially when you can do it using JavaScript.
I could build a simple web application that gets your latest train times or
Yelp reviews, but where’s the fun in that? Instead I’m going to pair a Pebble with one of the other current darlings of the hacker community, the ESP8266 WiFi module.
The full post is over at Packt: Using your smartwatch to control networked LEDs
If you want to dive into the code, there's a gist