For ages I have been trying to work out an easy way of making an IoT enabled LED string portable.
The big problem is how to post thing to people in other cities and round the world without them having to code their local wifi credentials into the device.
Now I can.
I’ve tried Electric Imp and Spark and Zigbee and Bluetooth and today I got my first ESP8266 and achieved the desired result on the first day.
Code that creates a custom AP that you connect to, which has a web page for you to enter your credentials, that it then goes and joins.
Early days yet, but stoked at the power and versatility of LUA-enabled wifi processors. And priced well, too.
As a Mac user, it was a bit of a mission getting the toolchain installed, but once I had it all worked out, it’s as easy as any other IDE.
The downside is, now I have another language to half-assedly learn.
I hear the Spark Photon will do something similar. I’m looking forward to trying it myself next month.
TheSpark(s) and the Imp have always been able to do it - it’s in their DNA. But I don’t want to have to do this through the cloud and pay for someone-else’s server to do so. But the Imp is really overkill for what I want and adds $25 to the cost of my circuit. One of my issues is the cost of getting Spark and Imp products outside of the US. It is silly money for Spark - like $25+ for shipping a single unit - Imp is better, because Sparkfun sell them and they have simply AWESOME shipping options for us outside the US. I can buy an ESP-7 or ESP-12 for around $2.50. That makes it eminently usable to add to an Arduino-powered device as its front-end.
All we need now is mDNS (avahi, Bonjour) so my device can be referred to as FASTled.local, and we are in business 
The Photon specifically uses AP mode to get wifi credentials. I think that is superior to the Spark Core which used TI’s proprietary method requiring an app, and Electric Imp, using a flashing screen on the phone (requiring an app) to load the credentials.
That’s too bad about international shipping. I’m hoping Adafruit and SparkFun will both carry the Photon when it’s released.
For some reason, Sparkfun doesn’t carry any of Spark.io’s products. But they don’t get any brickbats from me for that -they have a great range of stuff and are certainly the best US supplier when it comes to shipping options. They get all my stateside business.
And Spark have been completely disinterested in utilising any of the USPS’s many cheap mail options. They offer one, very expensive, option. Effectively, a Photon was going to cost $75.
And now, remote Arduino sketch upload via ESP and virtual Ethernet serial port…
Hopefully have it completely functional by the end of the day. Had middling results with virtual serial ports for the Mac. There seems to be a number of good options for Windows, but not for BSD/Mac OS.
So, if anyone knows of a good TTY> IP app or driver or shim or widget, for Mac OS X, please let me know
I haven’t needed to do that in years, but saved this bookmark: http://blog.philippklaus.de/2011/08/make-rs232-serial-devices-accessible-via-ethernet/
I had success with socat on the Mac.
Fantastic link, thanks! Get in me Ser2Net!