The hack we have for you today is among our most favorite types of hack: a good, honest, simple, and well documented implementation that meets a real need. Our hacker [Solo Pilot] has sent in a link to their basement monitor.
The documentation is quite good. It’s terse but comprehensive with links to related information. It covers the background, requirements, hardware design, sensors, email and SMS alerts, software details, and even has some credits at the end.
Implementing this project would be a good activity for someone who has already made an LED flash and wants to take their skills to the next level by sourcing and assembling the hardware and then configuring, compiling, deploying, and testing the software for this real-world project.
To make this project work you will need to know your way around the Arduino IDE in order to build the software from the src.zip file included with the documentation (hint: extract the files from src.zip into a directory called AHT20_BMP280 before opening AHT20_BMP280.ino and make sure you add necessary boards and libraries).
One feature of the basement monitor that we would like to see is a periodic “everything’s okay” signal from the device, just so we can confirm that the reason we’re not getting an alarm about flooding in the basement is because there is no flood, and not because the battery ran dead or the WiFi went offline.
If you’ve recently started on your journey into where electronics meets software a project such as this one is a really great place to go next. And of course once you are proficient with the ESP8266 there are a thousand such projects here at Hackaday that you can cut your teeth on. Such as this clock and this fault injection device.
Just curious — is anyone actually using ESP8266 for new projects these days?
Do the fine gentlehackers here honestly think it makes a difference? Either ESP are actively developed and supported. Not every project needs a dual core esp32-xyz123.
You source what is cheap. I still have old esp8266 and modern esp32 running 24/7 since years now on the same rusty old code and they are not breaking. Old MCUs deserve love and care too.
To expand on that, there is only one thing that matters, ever: “board design”. Since what good is the best MCU if the power regulators and antenna design on the dev board are all busted up?
Watch a youtube video by some swiss dude comparing 10 of the same. He does some power profiling and range testing and at the end you just think: “It’s not the MCU that kept me back.”
Yes.
I also use Arduinos from time to time. Why do you ask?
Because every time a new more powerful microcontroller becomes available, you should dump your existing stock of older models in the trash because they are laughably obsolete for using in a moisture detector ;-)
Fine by me especially if it brings down the price of the older ones 😋. 80% of my projects are an underwhelming MCU with 200 lines of Arduino connected to my laptops serial port
If newer MCU can be programmed with a $2 serial port USB dongle while the old one requires $80 ICD then I’ll gladly take the newer one.
No, it’s woefully underspecified for this. I’d recommend a modern datacenter server. U1 would suit fine, and be quite simple to implement.
You’d just leave it on the floor. Ping it every minute. If it gets submerged then it’ll stop responding and you know humidity is too high.
My main concern is around security. Don’t want my WLAN to be opened up and read the ESP8266 are less secure.
On the performance and classification of legacy, your comments resonate with my understanding. Just because there is someone younger doesn’t make the existing old per se. In particular, when I consider the use cases, I use them for.
I am not sure what you are going on about. It’s being actively developed and patched regularly, for years:
https://github.com/espressif/esp-idf/issues/7019#issuecomment-871810668
+1 for the regular check-in. This is a nice feature ESPHome gives you for free