2025-12-22

ESP8266 experimentations

I connected an Arduino-compatible ESP8266 to my Mac, flashed a quick sketch to join my WiFi, and set up a simple terminal listener using netcat. Once the device posted a message, the terminal echoed it back, which was a clean end-to-end check that the network connection and client-server flow were working.

Here is the basic terminal command I used on my Mac (replace the port if needed):

nc -l 8080

And here is a minimal ESP8266 sketch that connects to WiFi and sends a message to the listener (replace WiFi creds and the Mac's IP address):

#include <ESP8266WiFi.h>

const char* ssid = \"YOUR_WIFI_SSID\";
const char* password = \"YOUR_WIFI_PASSWORD\";
const char* host = \"192.168.1.10\";
const uint16_t port = 8080;

void setup() {
  Serial.begin(115200);
  WiFi.begin(ssid, password);

  while (WiFi.status() != WL_CONNECTED) {
    delay(250);
    Serial.print('.');
  }

  WiFiClient client;
  if (client.connect(host, port)) {
    client.println(\"hello from esp8266\");
    client.stop();
  }
}

void loop() {}