Don’t you hate it when something that was working stops? You can safely bet that it’s because, somewhere along the way, something has been ‘improved’. I needed to make a change to the code running on a couple of IoT room thermometers. These are built around the Adafruit Huzzah ESP8266 board (the non-Feather version). And they’ve been running flawlessly for months…. Read more »
In response to a flood of requests – well, okay, one – I’ve posted the code for this project on GitHub. But don’t expect to be able to run it. That’s the thing about a maker project – you can create it to be used by anyone who cares to download your designs and code; or you can optimise it… Read more »
These days, there’s a huge amount of support out there for virtually any device you can buy. But every now and again you need to do a bit of head-scratching. So this post is simply my way of helping out anyone who’s going through the same process I just did. I bought a couple of cheap ESP32 boards that have… Read more »
The best projects are the ones you finish. And as projects go, this IoT room thermometer – and, for good measure, clock – was one of the easier ones. To recap, I wanted a thermometer in my office to measure the temperature and compare that with how I’m doing, at any given time, in terms of hand pain. I have… Read more »
Having cobbled together an ESP8266 microcontroller, temperature sensor and TFT LCD screen, the next step was to have the device talk to a server. There are two reasons for wanting to connect to a server: first, to get time and date updates; and second, to report the temperature and humidity so that the server can display them on an intranet… Read more »
Impulsiveness is not always a good thing. So here’s a handy rule for you: first, prototype; then fabricate the PCBs. Doing it that way, things have a chance of going well. Reverse that order and … well, not so much. Not that it was a disaster. In fact I had prototyped this little project – mostly. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves…. Read more »
So I have MicroPython installed on an Adafruit Huzzah ESP8266 dev board. The next step is to get it to run something. MicroPython establishes a basic filesystem using the board’s flash memory. This is handy for storing configuration and data files. And it supports a directory structure. But there are two files in particular you need to get to grips… Read more »
Some time ago I witnessed people getting all kinds of excited about ESP8266 devices. Worth checking out, I thought, and promptly ordered about five boards – specifically the ESP8266 Huzzah boards from Adafruit. They’re not the cheapest, but with Adafruit you always know you’re getting quality and it has features like level-shifted (ie, 5V safe) RX pin and 3V3 output…. Read more »