It’s the same protocol, just without the photons. With a simple web-interface running on the ESP8266, they can control the AVR 2308 from a smartphone’s browser anywhere in the house.

The web server firmware opens up a ton of possibilities with CGI scripting. When booting up in AP mode, you can even connect the ESP8266 to another access point right from the your browser.

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 ...