For examples, the Arduino core for ESP8266 comes with plenty of interesting sketches to fiddle with! Note: As described earlier, when trying to program the ESP-01 as instructed here, you have to ...

The ESP-01 launched the ESP8266 revolution back in 2014, and while today you’re far more likely to see somebody use a later version of the chip in a Wemos or NodeMCU development board ...

There’s no interaction with the remote servers when operating the user interface so there is no need for an external Internet connection. The system supports Arduino and ESP controllers.