For this example during a session of Sunday night hacking an Adafruit ESP8266 Feather HUZZAH is used to control NeoPixels or a relay. In short, no external server, gateway, service, computer ...

There are a lot of ESP8266 projects in The Hackaday Prize this year, and [David]’s project is making great use of the relatively meager pinout of this module. He’s built an 8-channel relay ...

[Alexander] also had a couple of spare relays which he used to control the two buttons on his designated ‘sacrifice’ remote — one relay per button.

The data is displayed on an OLED display mounted to a PCB. Besides this the button present on the watch can control another ESP8266 Relay module directly through an IoT cloud service called Blynk.” ...