That monthly sacred day known as Pay Day has arrived.

I've ordered a few different types of ESP8266 based boards for my various projects:

• An ESP-07 based serial port board for my #Arduino Mega Expansion board
• A few ESP-01 modules to use as plug-in modules with my #Aquariumatic project
• For this, my #GBAA: Game Boy Advance Arduino project, a handfull of NodeMCU boards.

While I've been looking at various ways of connecting all the devices planned in here I've also been looking at ways to reduce the number of components.

I've ordered a 2.8" Serial Touchscreen from Nextion. These screens look great; design your GUI using their software and upload it to the screen via a micro SD card. Using this screen I can just use serial commands to interact with the user interface, offloading the grunt work of running menus in the process.

If I can get this to work to my advantage I can almost definitely do away with one of the arduinos in this build, and have the ESP8266 board (potentially the NodeMCU) operate as the master for all the GUI and WiFi connections. I would still love to keep keyboard emulation as a feature, so the Nano would be dropped, and the Pro Micro used as a slave with it's pins broken out.

Not only does it reduce the number of components, it also makes the flow of the project much, much simpler.

I can't wait for all my shiz to turn up!