So I got a Feather HUZZAH ESP8266 yesterday, my first Feather. It's sitting here happily running Blink at the moment -- so far so good. But I have a couple of questions:
1. The first time I uploaded Blink (from the Arduino IDE) it took several minutes; after that, subsequent uploads take maybe 20 seconds. Am I correct to guess that the long first upload was a one-time thing, perhaps due to some flash-burning to enable the Feather to understand the Arduino IDE rather than Lua?
2. The IDE "Board" options for the Feather includes a few items that aren't mentioned in the tutorial, so I left them at default settings: Debug port: "Disabled", Debug level: "None", and IWP Variant: "v2 Prebuilt (MSS=536)". Is that the right thing to do?
And one side note... I had some trouble uploading my first sketch, and it turned out to be because of my micro USB cable. I have two cables here in my office (not sure where either one came from), but I eventually figured out that they're both just power cables, not data cables. (I use both to recharge different little batteries.) When I tried to use them initially, the IDE said there was no COM port, and Windows Device Manager showed no COM port when I had the Feather plugged in. Finally I tried a third micro USB cable that came with a Kindle, and it worked properly -- a new COM port popped up in Device Manager, and the upload worked.
You can't tell a power-only cable from a data cable just by looking at it, so this is kind of a "gotcha" -- maybe this will help someone else if they run into the same problem.