Posted by: Miika Pietila 2 years ago

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Course report from Thursday 2022-11-10 where we looked a bit, but no too much, more advanced way of using ArduinoIDE. This time we had the special wifi-enabled microcontroller, the ESP8266 on two alternative development board options.

Setup

We started with installing the required development environment things, the Arduino IDE and then for the ESP8266 it is also needed to install the board definitions as ESP8266 is not a supported board out of the box.

Arduino IDE, https://www.arduino.cc/en/Main/Software

Board definitions, https://github.com/esp8266/Arduino#installing-with-boards-manager

Getting started

After the setup phase it was then time to look at some possibilities on the boards. The Witty board with the built in RGB led, button, and light dependant resitor (LDR) is a good board to start experimenting as it has those ready made input and output devices. A demo of running a really web server on the ESP8266 board with controls of hardware devices was an eye opener.

Demo: http://host.in.lan/rgb

https://github.com/vaasahacklab/esp_mini_rgb_blink_web

Ideation and further possibilities

Other possible option that was looked at is the creation of a temperature logger - also known as see your sauna temperature from the couch -device. This incorporated the ESP8266 board, a digital temperature sensor DS18B20 and a bit of wiring and in some cases soldering.

temperature logger: https://vaasa.hacklab.fi/2016/02/06/esp8266-on-nodemcu-board-ds18b20-arduinoide-thingspeak/
light logger: https://vaasa.hacklab.fi/2017/01/17/esp8266-witty-cloud-ldr-arduinoide-thingspeak-iot-light-sensor/

Backend for the logging can be anything suitable but as an example the https://thingspeak.com/ was used.

Random notes

Witty development board

//RGB-LED, ldr, button
// LDR = A0;
// GREEN = 12;
// BLUE = 13;
// RED = 15;
// BUTTON = 4;

Links for more stuff

Internet is full of ESP8266 and also ESP32 resources

Some more ESP8266 Arduino examples in the ArduinoIDE

ESP8266 --> Blink - blinks a LED.

ESP8266 --> BlinkWithoutDelay - as blink but does not use sleep but elapsedmilliseconds.

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Arduino part 2 - Basics of DIY IoT with ESP8266