ESP8266 IoT

[Ian]

I've recently started to get back in to doing electronics work, and things have changed so much from 10 years ago for the hobbyist. I bought an ESP8266 development board, a little device that contains a wi-fi chip, processor, 4MB memory and lots of GPIO pins... it cost me about £2.50 .

This tiny little device can be programmed just like an Arduino, but it has the ability to interconnect with other things thanks to the onboard wi-fi. In under an hour, it was possible to build a mini-webserver that tells me the temperature and humidity in the garage. Unbelievable to think that this cost me about £5 in parts.

If you're a novice coder and enjoy tinkering with electronics, I can highly recommend buying an ESP8266 and tinkering with Arduino. There are tons of interesting projects out there that are fully documented, on places like hackster.io or hackaday.com

I've bought a couple more of these devices in the past week, which I'm using to automate parts of our home as much as possible .

 

[V_R]

That's very cool. What other plans do you have for them?

 

[Ian]

So far, I've got 3 devices and my plans are:

• Pond water level/temperature datalogger. Sometimes the pond level drops a lot (on a windy day), so I wanted to have a way I could be alerted on my phone. Knowing the temperature should also give me a good idea of what I should be feeding the fish. This is pretty much ready to go, once a mini float switch arrives and I can design the enclosure (it uses a solar panel and rechargeable battery).
• Garage temperature, water leak detector and garage door relay. We've had a couple of leaks in the garage, one of which I didn't know about for a couple of days - so I'm putting a leak detector there. As there are loads of GPIO pins available, I thought I may as well have a temperature module on the board, as they only cost pennies. I'm also going to add a relay to control the garage door opener.
• LED strip lights controlled via HASS.io (Home assistant software).

I've been ordering parts from AliExpress.com as they're so cheap - for about £25 I've got a ton of parts that will build all the above and plenty more.