The ESP8266 is a chip that turned a lot of heads recently, stuffing a WiFi radio, TCP/IP stack, and all the required bits to get a microcontroller on the Internet into a tiny, $5 module.

As with the dedicated DAC, you could get away without it (and there are defines in the “playerconfig.h” file to do so) but you’ll probably regret it. In sum, an ESP8266 chip, a cheap I2S DAC ...