The chipset is the 8266 and, when soldered into a small printed circuit board with an embedded antenna (the gold square wave thingy that mostly goes across the top), it's basically a wifi-enabled breakout board.
The big deal is that it has GPIO pins. Now, most of them are already spoken-for (input current, ground, reset, serial input/output -- that sort of thing). But at least a couple of them are not. That allows them to communicate with other devices or widgets, most notably (for me, anyway) my latest obsession, the Arduino.
The bigger deal is that, relative to other options for granting wifi superpowers to a primative microcontroller (again, the Arduino), this is fairly inexpensive. $11-$12 Canadian is at the high end. (I'm sure eBay/Amazon can do better, but I prefer to support vendors who support the community. And provide datasheets.) Normally, this functionality would be at least as expensive as the full-size Arduinos, and require a specific model besides.
The biggest deal is that it seems to have gained a lot of interest--and, more importantly, community in a relatively short time. In practical terms, that means that people have donated their time to translate/interpolate the documentation from Chinese. And make it easier to program the chip. That says boatloads.
So my job for the next couple of evenings is to figure out how to make that itty-bitty chip connect to our wi-fi router and play nicely with other microcontrollers. Because if the ESP8266 family turns out to be all-that-and-a-bag-of-chips...holy moly, does that ever open up the possibilities...
