Arduino, along with a vast amount of peripheral boards, lacks integration of the networking capabilities in one SoC. Espressif ESP series was the natural answer for this disadvantage as their ESP 8266 with integrated WiFi, introduced in 2014, is widely recognised as a turning point for the IoT market, delivering de-facto fully functional IoT chip, providing high performance and low power to the end users and developers. ESP 32 launched in 2016 brought even more disrupting effect to the IoT ecosystems, introducing additional Bluetooth interface to the above. By the January 2018 company announced they delivered to the market 100 000 000 [1], thus constituting a de-facto standard for the IoT market devices.
Following chapters provide an overview of the networking programming with the use of ESP SoCs.