Point And Click To An IoT Button

March 8, 2017 by Al Williams 14 Comments

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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Wireless Doorbell Hacked Into Hands-on MQTT Tutorial

March 2, 2017 by Dan Maloney 10 Comments

The project itself is very simple: getting push notifications via MQTT when a wireless doorbell sounds. But as [Robin Reiter] points out, as the “Hello, world!” program is a time-honored tradition for coders new to a language, so too is his project very much the hardware embodiment of the same tradition. And the accompanying video build log below is a whirlwind tour that will get the first-timer off the ground and on the way to MQTT glory.

The hardware [Robin] chose for this primer is pretty basic – a wireless doorbell consisting of a battery-powered button and a plug-in receiver that tootles melodiously when you’ve got a visitor. [Robin] engages in a teardown of the receiver with attempted reverse engineering, but he wisely chose the path of least resistance and settled on monitoring the LEDs that flash when the button is pushed. An RFduino was selected from [Robin]’s ridiculously well-organized parts bin and wired up for the job. The ‘duino-fied doorbell talks Bluetooth to an MQTT broker on a Raspberry Pi, which also handles push notifications to his phone.

The meat of the build log, though, is the details of setting up MQTT. We’ve posted a lot about MQTT, including [Elliot Williams]’ great series on the subject. But this tutorial is very nuts and bolts, the kind of thing you can just follow along with, pause the video once in a while, and have a working system up and running quickly. There’s a lot here for the beginner, and even the old hands will pick up a tip or two.

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Custom Parts Put IKEA Window Shades On IoT

February 19, 2017 by Dan Maloney 18 Comments

No matter what the project is about, we’re always suckers for nicely integrated builds with good fit and finish. There’s a certain appeal to rat’s nest wiring on a breadboard, and such projects are valuable because they push the limits. But eventually you need to go from prototype to product, and that’s where this IKEA window shade automation project shines.

Integration is more than just putting everything in a nice box, especially for home automation gear – it really needs to blend. [ehsmaes] roller blind motorization project accomplishes that nicely with a 3D-printed case for the electronics, as well as a custom case for the geared stepper motor to drive the shade. The drive replaces the standard spring-loaded cap on the end of the IKEA Tupplur shade, and the neutral color of both cases blends nicely with the shade and surroundings. The control electronics include a NodeMCU and a motor shield; [eshmaes] warns that narrow shades work just fine off of USB power, but that wider windows will need a power boost. The IoT end of things is taken care of by MQTT and OpenHab, allowing the shades to be raised and lowered to any position. The short video below shows the calibration procedure for the shade.

Need a primer on MQTT? We’ve got you covered. Or perhaps you need to control the windows rather than the treatments.

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Hacking On The Weirdest ESP Module

February 13, 2017 by Elliot Williams 33 Comments

Sometimes I see a component that’s bizarre enough that I buy it just to see if I can actually do something with it. That’s the case with today’s example, the ESP-14. At first glance, you’d ask yourself what AI Thinker, the maker of many of the more popular ESP8266 modules, was thinking.

The ESP-14 takes the phenomenally powerful ESP8266 chip and buries it underneath one of the cheapest microcontrollers around: the 8-bit STM8S003 “value line” chip. Almost all of the pins of the ESP chip are locked inside the RF cage’s metal tomb — only the power, bootloader, and serial TX/RX pins see the light of day, and the TX/RX pins are shared with the STM8S. The rest of the module’s pins are dedicated to the STM8S. Slaving the ESP8266 to an STM8S is like taking a Ferrari and wrapping it inside a VW Beetle.

I had never touched an STM8 chip before, and just wanted to see what I could do with this strange beast. In the end, ironically, I ended up doing something that wouldn’t be too far out of place on Alibaba, but with a few very Hackaday twists: a monitor for our washer and dryer that reports power usage over MQTT, programmed in Forth with a transparent WiFi serial bridge into the chip for interactive debugging without schlepping down into the basement. Everything’s open, tweakable, and the Forth implementation for the STM8S was even developed here on Hackaday.io.

It’s a weird project for the weirdest of ESP modules. I thought I’d walk you through it and see if it sparks you to come up with any alternative uses for the ESP8266-and-STM8S odd couple that is the ESP-14.

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Voltmeter Speaks MQTT Without Libraries

January 25, 2017 by Elliot Williams 8 Comments

[Emilio Ficara] [built himself an Internet-connected MQTT multimeter](http://ficara.altervista.org/) (translated from Italian by robots). Or maybe we should say that [Emilio Ficara] undertook a long string of cool hacks that ended up in a WiFi-enabled multimeter, because the destination isn’t nearly as interesting as the voyage.

The multimeter, a DT-4000ZC, has a serial output but instead of transferring the data directly, it sends which cells on the LCD screen need to be activated. For testing along the way, [Emilio] used his own USB-serial-to-ESP01 dongle, which sounds like a useful tool to have around if you’re debugging an AT command session. He made a cute AVR SPI-port debugging aid with a reset button and diagnostic LEDs that we’re going to copy right now. Other home-made tools, like a 3.7V Li-ion battery manager and a serial data snooper make this project worth a look.

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Raspberry Pi Home Automation For The Holidays

January 13, 2017 by Elliot Williams 2 Comments

When you want to play around with a new technology, do you jump straight to production machinery? Nope. Nothing beats a simplified model as proof of concept. And the only thing better than a good proof of concept is an amusing proof of concept. In that spirit [Eric Tsai], alias [electronichamsters], built the world’s most complicated electronic gingerbread house this Christmas, because a home-automated gingerbread house is still simpler than a home-automated home.

Yeah, there are blinky lights and it’s all controlled by his smartphone. That’s just the basics. The crux of the demo, however, is the Bluetooth-to-MQTT gateway that he built along the way. A Raspberry Pi with a BTLE radio receives local data from BTLE sensors and pushes them off to an MQTT server, where they can in principle be read from anywhere in the world. If you’ve tried to network battery-powered ESP8266 nodes, you know that battery life is the Achilles heel. Swapping over to BTLE for the radio layer makes a lot of sense.

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PURE Modules Aim To Make Prototyping Easier

December 25, 2016 by Elliot Williams 15 Comments

[Sashi]’s PURE modules system wants your next wireless microcontroller and sensor module project to be put together using card-edge connectors. But it’s a lot deeper than that — PURE is an entire wireless gadget development ecosystem. Striking a balance between completeness and modularity is very difficult; a wire can carry any imaginable electronic signal, but just handing someone a pile of wires presents them a steep learning curve. PURE is at the other end of the spectrum: everything is specified.

So far, two microcontroller options are available in the system, the nRF52 series and TI’s CC2650. Both of these run the Contiki OS, so it doesn’t matter which of these you choose. Wired data is all transmitted over I2C and connects up via the previously-mentioned card-edge connectors. On the wireless side, data transport is handled through an MQTT broker, using the MQTT-sn variant which is better suited to small radio devices. At the protocol layer everything uses Protocol Buffers, Google’s newest idea for adding some structure to the data.

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