Ever heard of an Arduino? It's a $35 microcontroller that lets you write code that interacts with motors and lights and IRL stuff. Well, there's a $2 version that has all the same features and is the size of a postage stamp. It's call the ESP8266.
ESP8266 is an inexpensive wifi-enabled SoC made by the company Espressif. It was released in 2014 with very little documentation but its low cost motivated hardware hackers around the world to explore and document the module. Online communities formed to discuss the chip and how to build with it.