Making Something Useful With The ESP8266

January 5, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 7 Comments

The ESP8266 is the latest and greatest way to get a project connected to the Internet, but so far we haven’t seen many projects that actually do something with this very cool chip. Yes, there are a few people pinging away with AT commands, and there is a thriving community building interpreters and flashing new code on this chip, but not much in the way of actual projects. [Martin] is the exception. He’s come up with two projects that use the ESP8266.

The first project is one that puts the readings from a DHT22 temperature/humidity sensor up on the Internet. Following the spirit of all the recent development of the ESP8266, [Martin] isn’t using an external microcontroller. Instead, he’s using the SDK to run an HTTP daemon using [Sprite_TM]’s code. This web server provides an interface to turn an LED on and off, and reports the temperature and humidity readings from the DHT22. It’s simple, but it’s easy to see how this tiny chip could become the basis for a smart thermostat.

If lighting up LEDs isn’t enough, [Martin] has another project that includes three solid state relays. This one is a bit more complex with MQTT support, a fancy jQuery interface, and support for network time. [Martin] isn’t quite ready to publish the complete code for this project, but that’s only because there are a few features he’d like to implement before making it public. These include dynamic DNS, scheduling functionality, and support for an I2C status display. Even without these fancy features, it’s still a great project that’s still extremely capable for an Internet of Things thing. You can check out [Martin]’s video demo of this board below.

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Using The ESP8266 As A Web-enabled Sensor

November 23, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 34 Comments

A few months ago, the ESP8266 came onto the scene as a cheap way to add WiFi to just about any project that had a spare UART. Since then, a few people have figured out how to get this neat chip running custom firmware, opening the doors to an Internet of Things based around an ESP8266. [Marc] and [Xavi] just wrote up a quick tutorial on how to turn the ESP8266 into a WiFi sensor platform that will relay the state of a GPIO pin to the Internet.

If you’re going to replicate this project, you won’t be using the stock firmware on the ESP. Instead of the stock firmware, [Marc] and [Xavi] are using the Lua-based firmware that allows for access to a few GPIOs on the device and scripting support to make application development easy. To upload this firmware to the ESP, [Marc] and [Xavi] needed a standard FTDI USB to serial converter, a few AT commands through a terminal program, and a few bits of wire.

The circuit [Marc] and [Xavi] ended up demoing for this tutorial is a simple webpage that’s updated every time a button is pressed. This will be installed in the door of their hackerspace in Barcelona, but already they have a great example of the ESP8266 in use.

The Future Of The Internet Of Things

November 16, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 81 Comments

When buying anything, you’re going to have a choice: good, fast, or cheap. Pick any two. A plumber will fix a drain good and fast, but it won’t be cheap. The skeezy guy you can call will fix a drain fast and cheap, but it won’t be good.

Such it is with radios. You can have long-range (good), high bandwidth (fast), or a low price (cheap). Pick any two. The Internet of Things demands a cheap, long-range radio module, but until now this really hasn’t existed. At Electronica last week, Microchip demoed their IoT solution, the LoRa. This module has a 15km (rural) or ~3km (heavy urban) range, works for a year on two AAA batteries, and is very cheap. Bandwidth? That’s crap, but you’re not streaming videos to your shoe.

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Another Internet Of Things Board (But This One Has Lisp)

October 23, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 26 Comments

Using routers as dev boards has been a long and cherished tradition in the circles we frequent, and finally design houses in China are taking notice. There have been a few ‘Internet of Things’ boards in recent months that have taken the SoC found in low-end routers, packaged the on a board with USB, some GPIOs, and a fair bit of memory and called it a dev board. The ZERO Plus is not an exception to this trend, but it does include a very interesting feature when it comes to the development environment: this one uses Lisp as its native language.

The Zero Plus is pretty much what you would expect from a router SoC being transplanted to an Internet of Things board: it uses the Ralink RT5350 SoC, giving it 802.11b/g/n, has 32MB of RAM, 8 or 16 M of Flash, I2C, I2S, SPI, USB, two UARTs, and 14 GPIOs. There is support for a webcam, temperature and humidity sensor, displays, and Arduino via a breakout board that appears to contain a standard, DIP-sized ATMega328,

All of that could be found in dozens of other boards, though. What really sets this one apart is the Lisp development environment. Programming the Zero is exactly as elegant as you would expect, with a ‘toggle a LED according to what time it is’ program looking something like this:

(define LED_On (lambda ()(dev.gpio 11 "out" 1)))
 (define LED_Off (lambda ()(dev.gpio 11 "out" 0)))
 (define CurrentTime? (lambda ()
    (int (time.strftime "%H" (time.localtime (time.time))))))
       (define Night?
          (lambda ()
            (and
            (> ( CurrentTime? ) 16) (< ( CurrentTime? ) 23)
          )
       )
    )
 (if (Night?) (LED_On) (LED_Off)

Dev boards built around somewhat more esoteric programming language isn’t anything new; The Espruino brings Javascript to ARM microcontrollers, and the MicroPython project is an astonishing undertaking and successful Kickstarter that brings the BASIC for the 21st century to the embedded world. Lisp, though… I don’t think anyone expected that. It’s a great way to differentiate your product, though.

The Internet Of Things Chip Gets A New Spectrum

October 20, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 52 Comments

Last year we learned about Weightless, an Internet of Things chip that solves all the problems of current wireless solutions. It’s low power and has a 10-year battery life (one AA cell), the hardware should cost around $2 per module, and the range of the Weightless devices range from 5+km in urban environments to 20-30km in rural environments. There haven’t been many public announcements from the Weightless SIG since the specification was announced, but today they’re announcing Weightless will include an additional spectrum, the 868/915 MHz ISM spectrum.

The original plan for Weightless was to use the spectrum left behind by UHF TV – between 470 and 790MHz. Regulatory agencies haven’t been moving as fast as members of the Weightless SIG would have hoped, so now they’re working on a slightly different design that uses the already-allocated ISM bands. They’re not giving up on the TV whitespace spectrum; that’s still part of the plan to put radio modules in everything. The new Weightless-N will be available sooner, though, with the first publicly available base station, module, and SDK arriving sometime next spring.

Weightless has put up a video describing their new Weightless-N hardware; you can check that out below. If you want the TL;DR of how Weightless can claim such a long battery life and huge range from an Internet of Things radio module, here’s an overly simplified explanation: power, range, and bandwidth. Pick any two.

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GCC For The ESP8266 WiFi Module

October 2, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 69 Comments

When we first heard about it a few weeks ago, we knew the ESP8266 UART to WiFi module was a special beast. It was cheap, gave every microcontroller the ability to connect to a WiFi network, and could – possibly – be programmed itself, turning this little module into a complete Internet of Things solution. The only thing preventing the last feature from being realized was the lack of compiler support. This has now changed. The officially unofficial ESP8266 community forums now has a working GCC for the ESP8266.

The ESP8266 most people are getting from China features a Tensilica Xtensa LX3 32-bit SOC clocked at 80 MHz. There’s an SPI flash on the board, containing a few dozen kilobytes of data. Most of this, of course, is the code to run the TCP/IP stack and manage the radio. There are a few k left over – and a few pins – for anyone to add some code and some extended functionality to this module. With the work on GCC for this module, it’ll be just a few days until someone manages to get the most basic project running on this module. By next week, someone will have a video of this module connected to a battery, with a web-enabled blinking LED.

Of course that’s not the only thing this module can do; at less than $5, it will only be a matter of time until sensors are wired in, code written, and a truly affordable IoT sensor platform is created.

If you have a few of these modules sitting around and you’d like to give the new compiler a go, the git is right here.

Internet Of Things Refrigerator Alarm

September 29, 2014 by Bryan Cockfield 31 Comments

For anyone who gets a late-night craving for anything out of the refrigerator and needs some help in the willpower department, [Claudio] may have the project for you. He has just finished work on a project that sends out an alarm when the refrigerator door opens, alerting others that you’re on the prowl for munchies.

The device uses a light sensor connected to an OpenPicus IoT kit that contains a FlyportPRO Wi-Fi module. When the refrigerator door is opened, the device sends out an email message via a web server, which can be sent to whomever you choose. All of the project’s code and instructions are available on the project site as well.

The project is pretty clever in that no actual interfacing with the refrigerator is required, beyond running a power cable through the seal of the door (although [Claudio] notes that the device will run on a lithium battery as an option). The web server itself can be set up to send out alarms during any timeframe as well, allowing a user to customize his or her nighttime snacking window. If you’re looking for a less subtle approach, we’d recommend the fridge speakers with a volume setting of 11.