The availability of cheap radios, omni-present WiFi and powerful web services means the IoT wave is here to stay. Amazon got into the act with its “do only one thing” Dash button. But a more interesting solution would be an IoT “do it all” button.
[Anand] has been working on his 1btn Open Source WiFi connected IoT button for a while. It connects to the Internet over WiFi to trigger whatever action you have assigned to it using a simple, online interface. It’s reconfigurable and open source. Which means it can be used in pretty imaginative ways, and if needed, can be re-flashed with your own custom firmware should you decide to really get under its hood.
The 1btn’s ESP8266 module is usually in sleep mode, waking up when the button is pressed, making the connection, performing the task and then going back to sleep once confirmation is received. A Red/Green LED indicates if the action was successful or not. You can set it up to send e-mails, messages, tweets or perform actions via a custom script, API or the IFTTT – maker channel. To make it hacker friendly, all of the ESP8266 GPIO pins are accessible via headers. This makes it convenient to add external sensors, for example. There’s also a (unpopulated) QFN footprint to allow adding an ATmega device (168P/328P) whose GPIO pins are also accessible via headers. This opens up a large number of additional applications for the device such as home automation.
On the software side, the 1btn connects to a web console, where you can set up an account, configure the device, register its MAC ID, assign it an alias and set up its actions. All of the source files for the 1btn – firmware, enclosure, schematic, BOM, PCB layout and example use cases – are posted on his Github repository.
Nice! My buddy wants to build some bluetooth gauges/plugs and I dont have the skills. Thanks to open source he can fulfill his dream. Rock on!
Derp. wish I had one that could delete my previous comment.
we do something somewhat similar (its not quite open, yet…) but a generic button (and display) with our Puck (https://flair.co)
Your product has nothing in common here, why would you say otherwise?
Seems more like a competitor from Nest, and not open source… I guess Hackaday have spot dedicated for advertisement, so don’t spare the money and spam the comment, just buy some ad.
This may work with an old project called hexadoc that I have in hold.
In short, my idea was that each hexadoc represent a neuron. The idea is to interconnect devices and hexadocks to create an equivalent of a brain.
http://www.acarlstein.com/?p=2651
I welcome any feedback about the idea.
Alejandro, your priest is Computing oriented while 1btn is action oriented. However, you can choose to use 1btn hardware and reflash it with your project firmware.