the esp8266 wemos boards are incredibly cheap and easy to handle, they have a couple of IO ports, enough memory and a lot of storage. The Nodemcu OS makes it even easier to quickly develop and deploy lots of small applications.
tooling
Esplorer is the de facto IDE for nodeMCU, from there you can easily build and upload scripts to the wemos boards.
firmware
with nodemcu cutsom builds you can select which libraries you want to include.
the init.lua is the first script which is being started after bootup, I use the following generic script.
