Internet of Things Experiment Guide
Contributors:
Shawn Hymel
Soldering and Arduino Setup
Soldering
If your ESP8266 Thing Dev Board did not come with pre-soldered headers, you'll need to attach them yourself. Solder male break-away headers or stackable headers to the Thing Dev Board.
Arduino
The ESP8266 community has created a library and bootloader that allows us to program ESP8266 chips and boards using Arduino (see this GitHub repository for more information).
Note: The Arduino IDE is updated regularly, which can result in the ESP8266 library not working properly. As a result, we recommend specifically using v1.6.5 of the Arduino IDE for these experiments.
Once you have the Arduino IDE installed, follow the directions on this page to install the ESP8266 library.
At the end of the installation guide, you should have the Thing Dev Board running the Blink sketch: