Mongoose Wizard new project dialog.

Web Dashboard And OTA Updates For The ESP32

Today we are happy to present a web-based GUI for making a web-based GUI! If you’re a programmer then web front-end development might not be your bag. But a web-based graphical user interface (GUI) for administration and reporting for your microcontroller device can look very professional and be super useful. The Mongoose Wizard can help you develop a device dashboard for your ESP32-based project.

In this article (and associated video) the Mongoose developers run you through how to get started with their technology. They help you get your development environment set up, create your dashboard layout, add a dashboard page, add a device settings page, add an over-the-air (OTA) firmware update page, build and test the firmware, and attach the user-interface controls to the hardware. The generated firmware includes an embedded web server for serving your dashboard and delivering its REST interface, pretty handy.

You will find no end of ESP32-based projects here at Hackaday which you could potentially integrate with Mongoose. We think the OTA support is an excellent feature to have, but of course there are other ways of supporting that functionality.

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Point And Click To An IoT Button

The availability of cheap WiFi boards like the ESP8266 and others means you can inexpensively put projects on the network. But there is still the problem of how to connect these devices to other places reliably. An Open Source project that attempts to make that whole effort point and click is Mongoose OS. The open source system works with the ESP8266, ESP32, and several other platforms. It is well integrated with Amazon’s IoT backend, but it isn’t locked to it.

Everyone wants to be your IoT broker and we see products appear (and disappear) regularly aimed at capturing that market. One common way to send and receive messages from a tiny device to a remote server is MQTT, an ISO standard made with resource-limited devices in mind. Many IoT services speak this protocol, including Amazon’s IoT offering. You can see how quick it is to flash an ESP8266 to make an Amazon IoT button in the video below. Although the video example uses Amazon, you can configure the system to talk to any public or private MQTT broker.

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