Hardware and software requirements

The first thing we need for this project is the ESP8266 Wi-Fi chip. As for most of this book, I will be using the Adafruit Huzzah ESP8266 board here.

Then, the other important component for this project will be the robot platform. There are many options on the market, but there are actually not so many that are made for the ESP8266, so we will need to choose a very generic platform that we can just mount the components of our choosing on.

We basically need a certain amount of features to have a robot platform for this project:

• The platform needs to have at least two wheels
• The platform needs to have two motors
• The platforms needs to be big enough to host the ESP8266, a breadboard, and batteries

There are actually a large number of robot platforms that would work with those specifications. The first category is of course the simple two-wheeled robot kits, such as this kit from EmGreat:

These platforms just have two wheels with a motor on each, and then a free...