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Comment by xchip | Hacker News Reader

Why do you want an Arduino when the ESP8266 is half the price and has WIFI?

Up until recently, at least, ESP8266 boards were far more finicky. Even today, for a simple task that didn't need wifi, I'd probably trust an Arduino a little more than an ESP'.

It may also be partially a software thing - there are a lot of libraries that were written for Arduinos and then adapted to mostly work on ESP's. This too has been improving recently.

And, as others have mentioned, Arduinos have better built-in analog support.

More analog pins, is the only compelling reason I can come up with. In general I think the ESP is a better choice for most "turn the LEDs on and off" type of project though.

For applications that need Wifi, the ESP8266 is indeed a good and very competitively priced product.

However, all the wifi magic on the chip is closed source, and the datasheets / documentation are much less complete than chips like the ATmega328 (which the Arduino Uno is based on). The ATmega328 has a 660-page datasheet, whereas the ESP8266 has a 30-page datasheet.

People who can read data sheets tend not to use Arduino.

Maybe, but this (often buggy) closed source stuff and not having a proper data sheet causes a lot of trouble for projects creating these nice firmwares (micropython, nodemcu, …) which people tend to use.

I can read datasheets perfectly well, and Arduino seems pretty good by the low standards of microprocessor programming tooling.

I mean, you can program in C rather than assembly language! And you don't have to pay £300 a seat for the compiler! It works on windows, linux and mac instead of being windows-only! If you open source your project, other people can contribute and they don't even need a £150 tool to download the program to the chip! Other people can compile your code and have it work without needing to know the details of 'linker scripts' and 'codesourcery toolchains' and all that stuff!

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