There is a large ecosystem of IoT development tools by now, which means it extremely easy to get up and running with hardware like the esp8266. In this particular case, we will use the following hardware prototyping products from Adafruit:

• Feather HUZZAH ESP8266 Board
• 16 RGB LED NeoPixel Ring
• 150mAh LiPo Battery
• Tactile Buttons
• Vibrating Motor

Communication between the call buttons and the host computer will take place over the MQTT message passing protocol. On the ESP8266 side, MQTT is a built in package in the NodeMCU embedded development environment (MIT license). On the host side, we will use MQTT broker Mosquitto for message distribution (EPL/EDL license).