Just to be sure, he shorted the transmit and receive lines to see that he did get an echo back from a terminal program. Unsurprisingly, you can also repurpose an ESP8266 to perform this same task.

The ESP8266 is the answer to “I want something with Wifi.” Surprisingly, there are a number of engineers and hobbyists who have not heard of this chip or have heard of it but don’t really ...