ESP8266

645 Articles

Four Years Of Learning ESP8266 Development Went Into This Guide

July 30, 2019 by 20 Comments

The ESP8266 is a great processor for a lot of projects needing a small microcontroller and Wi-Fi, all for a reasonable price and in some pretty small form factors. [Simon] used one to build a garage door opener. This project isn’t really about his garage door opener based on a cheap WiFi-enabled chip, though. It’s about the four year process he went through to learn how to develop on these chips, and luckily he wrote a guide that anyone can use so that we don’t make the same mistakes he did.

The guide starts by suggesting which specific products are the easiest to use, and then moves on to some “best practices” for using these devices (with which we can’t argue much), before going through some example code. The most valuable parts of this guide especially for anyone starting out with these chips are the section which details how to get the web server up and running, and the best practices for developing HTML code for the tiny device (hint: develop somewhere else).

[Simon] also makes extensive use of the Chrome developers tools when building the HTML for the ESP. This is a handy trick even outside of ESP8266 development which might be useful for other tasks as well. Even though most of the guide won’t be new to anyone with experience with these boards, there are a few gems within it like this one that might help in other unrelated projects. It’s a good read and goes into a lot of detail about more than just the ESP chips. If you just want to open your garage door, though, you have lots of options.

ESP8266 Sound Machine Soothes Baby Remotely

July 28, 2019 by 7 Comments

[Zack] had trouble getting his six-month-old to sleep through the night. That was before he found out about ‘shh’ videos on YouTube. These are exactly what they sound like: eight hours of someone whooshing white noise into a microphone. He set a phone up on a charger in the nursery and let one of these play overnight. But the phone was unreliable. It would lock up, or just crash completely, making the baby’s distress worse.

To restore peace in the house, he built a sound machine that both simplifies and fortifies the white noise shh-loution. It uses an ESP8266 and a DFPlayer Mini to loop a lone MP3 file of shh-video audio and play it from a small speaker. By integrating the machine with Home Assistant, he’s able to trigger the sound remotely at baby’s bedtime. ESP Home has no module for the DFPlayer, but [Zack] built one that he’s happy to share.

If you are mired in early parenthood, this is a nice, simple solution. The DFPlayer does all the work of reading from the SD card and converting the signal to analog for speaker output, so there’s no need to get your hands dirty wasting valuable sleeping or kid-playing time.

Once the kid starts toddling out of babyhood, [Zack] could turn to ESP8266-based ambient lighting to help establish the difference between sleep and wake time.

Familiar Parts Make Interfacing Weather Station Easy

July 27, 2019 by 12 Comments

Hackers love to measure things, and enjoy monitoring the world around them. Weather stations are a big part of this, and many tinkerers have tried to interface such hardware with varying levels of success. [Ray] is one such individual, and was pleasantly surprised when working on a recent project.

Unlike more old-school models, the model [Ray] found himself working on was a modern unit with a significant number of sensors, a WiFi interface, and even a color screen. Reading the manual, [Ray] noted the device used the IP 192.168.4.1, which is commonly used by the ESP8266 when running in AP mode. The hunch proved to be correct, and opening the device revealed an ESP-WROOM-2 running the show.

Now working with familiar parts, it was simple to hook up to the onboard serial port to scope for data. To [Ray]’s delight, the device was outputting all the weather data out over the connection, and in plaintext to boot. The station also featured the ability to connect to Weather Underground, and watching the debug messages during this process helped [Ray] to understand the format of the information.

It’s rare that manufacturers make it so easy, but debug ports can often be a treasure trove of information to the budding hacker. We’ve seen others cracked before, too.

Tea Bot Solves Another First World Problem

July 24, 2019 by 19 Comments

In the movie Wall-E, future humans live in floating chairs and have everything done for them. Today, we grumble if we have to go to physically find a light switch or a remote control. How far away can floating chairs with screens be? T2, the Tea Bot, gets us one step closer to that. Using a laser-cut frame, an ESP8266, and a servo motor, the T2 brews your tea for exactly the right amount of time.

We were kind of hoping the robot would at least dunk the tea bag in and out, but it does provide a web interface that lets you select the brew. Of course, the code is available, so you could make modifications — maybe turn on a hotplate underneath the cup.

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Weather Station Can Rock You Like A Hurricane

July 22, 2019 by 5 Comments

People love to talk about the weather. It’s the perfect small talk, whether you’re trying to start a conversation or keep one going by avoiding an awkward silence. In the same fashion, weather stations are an ideal starting point for any sort of sensor-related project ideas. You get to familiarizing yourself with communication buses, ADCs, general data acquisition, and you learn a lot in figuring out how to visualize it all.

What if your weather station didn’t visualize anything? [OttoNL] is answering that question with a MIDI-generating Weather Station that uses the mood of the music to convey the condition of the elements outside.

Using an ESP8266 programmed via the Arduino IDE, [OttoNL] hooked up a light dependent resistor, a rain sensor, and the all-round workhorse BME280 for temperature, barometric pressure, and humidity to it. Reading the sensors, the ESP will generate MIDI notes that are sent to a connected synthesizer, with each sensor influencing a different aspect of the generated MIDI signals. A sadder, slow tune will play during rain and a fast upbeat one during sunshine. While it doesn’t use the ESP’s WiFi functionality at all at this point, a future version could easily retrieve some weather forecast data from the internet and add it into the mix as well.

Connect this to your alarm clock, and you can start your day off in the appropriate mood. You can even customize your breakfast toast to really immerse your morning routine in abstract weather cues.

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An ESP8266 Clock With Built-In Notifications

June 22, 2019 by 6 Comments

When we recently discussed the skills that we might wish to impart upon a youngster, one of those discussed was the ability to speak more than one language. If any demonstration were required as to why that might be the case, it comes today in [Byfeel]’s Notif’Heure, an ESP8266-powered clock and display (French-language, Google Translate link). If we only watch for English-language projects, we miss much of the picture.

The project began life in April 2018 (Google Translate link) and has since speedily progressed through many software versions to the current v3.2. In hardware terms it’s pretty simple: an ESP8266 development board drives a set of LED matrix displays. In the software though it has the primary function of an NTP-synchronised clock, there is also support for notification display and integration with the Jeedom home automation package.

We’ve featured innumerable ESP8266 clocks over the years, but surprisingly this is the first one with Jeedom integration. With so many to choose from it’s difficult to pick examples to show you, so perhaps it’s time to go to the truly ridiculous with this twelve-ESP monster.

Merci beaucoup au [Erwin] pour le tip!

Let A Spooky Owl Tell You The Weather

June 18, 2019 by 2 Comments

There can be few readers who were young in the 1970s who did not want to share in the adventures of the fearless animated ghost-hunting young crime-fighters of Scooby-Doo. What do you remember from the series though? The Mystery Machine van? Scooby snacks? Or perhaps the improbably haunted theme parks whose owners would have got away with it if it hadn’t been for those pesky kids? For [Alex Shakespeare] it seems to have been the trope of haunted pictures whose subject’s eyes would follow the protagonists around the room, because when he made a wall-mounted weather indicator he gave it an owl with eyes doing just that.

The weather part of the device is straightforward enough, an ESP8266 board drives a set of servos that move dial indicators according to data from the Dark Sky API. The owl’s moving googly eyes are the party piece though, for them the ESP takes input from an Adafruit AMG8833 thermal sensor array and drives a servo and lever arrangement to do the moving. Finally, the thermal camera’s output is available to see on the ESP’s web server. All the details of the project can be found via a GitHub repository.

The result is shown in the video below the break, and as you might expect in the spirit of its inspiration it’s more comedic than haunting. But maybe there’s the root of the popularity of artworks that follow the viewer, of which this is merely the latest in a long line.

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