Two Great Radios Taste Great Together

July 15, 2016 by Elliot Williams 25 Comments

[Johan Kanflo] sent us his latest recipe: a blend of one part RFM69 sub-gigahertz radio transceiver with one part ESP8266 module. The resulting dish looks absolutely delicious!

We’re all charmed with the ease of use that the ESP8266 brings to the table — plug it in and you’re talking to your existing WiFi network — but we hate the power consumption for battery-powered applications. WiFi is a power hog. And although ISM-band radio modules make point-to-point communications cheap and power-saving, getting them to talk with your computer takes an adapter.

So [Johan] combined the two radios and made a sweet ISM-radio-to-WiFi bridge. His demo application takes whatever data is sent over the ISM band and pushes it to an MQTT broker on his WiFi network. Hardware and firmware are up on GitHub.

We’ve been wanting a device like this for our home network for a while now. Kudos, [Johan] for making it so easy!

Avoiding Exercise With An ESP8266 And Blynk

July 11, 2016 by Al Williams 22 Comments

[Mike Diamond] was tired of climbing down (and back up) 40 stairs to check his mailbox. He decided to create a mailbox alert using the ESP8266 to connect to his WiFi. The idea was simple: have the ESP8266 monitor when the mailbox flap opened using a magnet and a reed switch. As always, though, the devil is in the details. [Mike] got things working with a little help and shares not only the finished design but how he got there.

To handle the sending of e-mail, [Mike] used the Blynk app. You often think of Blynk as a way to build user interfaces on an Android or iOS device that can control an Arduino. In this case, though, [Mike] used the library with the ESP8266 and had it send e-mail on his behalf.

Continue reading “Avoiding Exercise With An ESP8266 And Blynk” →

Micropython Binaries For The ESP8266 To Be Released

July 11, 2016 by Elliot Williams 20 Comments

MicroPython is a Kickstarted project that brings Python to small, embeddable devices. As part of the terms of the Kickstarter, supporters were to get exclusive access to binary builds, with a few exceptions. Now it looks like the ESP8266-version is going to be added to the binary list. This is awesome news for anyone who enjoys playing around with the popular WiFi chip.

But even more heartwarming is the overwhelming response of the Kickstarter’s backers for making the binary builds public. Basically everyone was in favor of opening the binaries up to the general public, and many wrote that they wanted public binaries all along. People can be so giving.

But there’s also something in it for them! The more people get behind MicroPython, the more (free and paid) development support it will warrant, and the more bug reports it will garner. Wins all around. So keep clicking refresh on the binary list until you see it live. Or better yet, if you’re interested, head over to the forum. (Or just wait for us to cover it here. You know we will.)

Broadcasting Bluetooth Beacons With Bubbles

July 10, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 15 Comments

Bluetooth beacons have only been around for a few years, but the draw is incredible. With Bluetooth beacons, your phone is location aware, even with location services are turned off. They’re seen in fast food joints, big box retailers, and anywhere else there’s a dollar to be made. [Nemik] has been working on a home automation project, and came up with a use for Bluetooth beacons that might actually be useful. It’s a WiFi-based Bluetooth beacon notifier that scans the area for beacons and forwards them to an MQTT server.

[Nemik]’s ‘Presence Detector’ for Bluetooth advertisements is actually a surprisingly simple build, leveraging the unbelievably cheap wireless modules available to us today. The WiFi side of the equation is a NodeMCU v2 ESP8266 dev board that provides all the smarts for the device via Lua scripting. The Bluetooth side of the board is a PTR5518 module that has a nRF51822 tucked inside. With the right configuration, this small board will listen for BLE advertisements and forward them to an MQTT server where they can be seen by anyone on the network.

[Nemik] is selling these beacon to WiFi bridges, but in the spirit of Open Hardware, he’s also giving away the designs and firmware so you can make your own. If you ever have an abundance of Bluetooth beacons sitting around and want to make a beacons of Things thing, this is the build for it.

Hackaday Prize Entry: ESP Swiss Knife

July 4, 2016 by Moritz Walter 5 Comments

The best equipment won’t help you if you don’t have it with you in the moment you need it. Knowledge, experience, and a thick skin may help you out there in the mud of the hardware battlegrounds, but they can’t replace a multimeter, an oscilloscope, a logic analyzer, a serial console or a WiFi access point. [Arcadia Labs] has taken on the challenge of combining most of these functions into a single device, developing the Hacker’s equivalent of a Swiss Army Knife: The ESP Swiss Knife.

Just like a Swiss Army Knife is first and foremost a knife, the EPS Swiss Knife is first and foremost an ESP8266. That means it is already a great platform for any kind of project, and [Arcadia Labs] supercharged the plain ESP-12E module by adding a couple of useful features commonly used in many projects. There’s an OLED display, four pushbuttons, a temperature sensor, and a Li-Ion cell with a charging module to power the device on the go. A universal “utility socket” breaks out the ESP8266’s leftover GPIOs and the supply voltage for attaching further peripherals.

With the hardware up and running, [Arcadia Labs] went on with building a couple of applications to provide the functionality that would make the device earn its name. Among them is a basic oscilloscope, a digital NTP based clock, a thermometer, a WiFi tester, a weather station and a 3D printer status monitor. More applications are planned, such as a chronometer, a timer, a DSLR intervalometer and more. A protective 3D printable enclosure is also in the works. [Arcadia Labs] has been joining the Hackaday Prize 2014 and 2015 before and we’re glad to see another great build coming into existence!

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Wired Networking For The ESP8266

July 1, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 42 Comments

The ever popular ESP8266 is popping up in more and more projects. There are CNC controllers, blinkey WiFi lighting, and downright bizarre WiFi to Ethernet bridges. [Cicero] has thrown his hat into the ring with one of these Ethernet-enabled ESP8266 builds, and right now everything works, it’s simple to put together, and cheap to build.

Astute readers will notice we’ve seen something like this before. A few months ago, [cnlohr] discovered the Ethernet controller in the ESP8266. This was, by every account, the hard way of doing things. [cnlohr] was driving the Ethernet directly through the ESP’s I2S bus. [Cicero]’s project does not. It uses the cheap ENC28J60 SPI to Ethernet adapter to put the ESP on a wired network. Is one solution better than the other? That’s arguable. Is one solution much simpler than the other? Yes, [Cicero]’s work allows anyone to add Ethernet to the ESP8266 with a few resistors and a module that costs $3 from the usual online shops.

With the Ethernet stack taken from [Ulrich Radig], the SPI driver from [MetalPhreak], and an ESP8266-based web server from [Sprite_tm], [Cicero] managed to serve up web pages through both the wired and wireless connections.

Although this build is not as technically amazeballs as [cnlohr]’s work with driving Ethernet directly from the ESP, it is very easy to implement, opening up the doors to a few of the more interesting capabilities of a wired ESP. With the Ethernet unlocked, there’s a free WiFi interface to wardrive, snoop around in promiscuous mode, inject packets, bridge a bunch of ESPs in mesh mode to another network, and other network shenanigans. The ENC28J60 modules have probably already found their way into a few parts bins and junk boxes already, making [Cicero]’s work the quick start guide to wired networking on the ESP.

Thanks [PuceBaboon] for sending this one in.

How To Keep An Unruly Dryer In Line

June 24, 2016 by James Hobson 29 Comments

If necessity is the mother of invention, then inconvenience is its frustrating co-conspirator. Faced with a finicky dryer that would shut down mid-cycle with a barely audible beep if its load was uneven (leaving a soggy mass of laundry), [the0ry] decided to add the dryer to the Internet of Things so it could send them an email whenever it shut itself down.

After opening a thinger.io account, adding the soon-to-be device, and setting up the email notification process, [the0ry] combined the ESP8266 Development Board, a photosensitive resistor, and a 5V power supply on a mini breadboard. All that was left was to mount it on the dryer and direct the LDR (light-dependent resistor) to the machine’s door lock LED to trigger an email when it turned off — indicating the cycle had finished or terminated prematurely. A little tape ensured the LDR would only be tripped by the desired light source.

If you’re an apartment-dweller have WiFi in the wash area it would be awesome to see a battery-powered version you take with you. But in general this is a great hardware blueprint as many device have status LEDs that can be monitored in a similar way. If you want to keep the server in-house (literally in this case) check out the Minimal MQTT series [Elliot Williams] recently finished up. It uses a Raspberry Pi as the center server and an ESP8266 is one of the limitless examples of hardware that plays nicely with the protocol.

We love seeing hacks like this because not only does it conserve water and energy by reducing instances of rewashing, but it’s also a clever way to extend the life of an appliance and potentially save hundreds of dollars in replacing it. Add this to the bevvy of hacks that add convenience to one’s home — some of which produce delicious results.