The ESP8266 is a chip that turned a lot of heads recently, stuffing a WiFi radio, TCP/IP stack, and all the required bits to get a microcontroller on the Internet into a tiny, $5 module.

Of course, you could get rid of the nice-sounding DAC chip and output 5-bit PWM directly from the ESP8266, but aside from being a nice quick demo, it’s going to sound like crap. The other ...