Category Archives: IoT thermometer

ESP32 room thermometer: with 18650 battery level indicator

It seemed like a good idea at the time. The TTGO ESP32 microcontroller board that I’m using for a room thermometer project comes with a battery connect and charging circuitry for a Li-Ion cell. It would be so much easier to deploy the thermometer if I could run it off a battery. And it works. Kinda. There are issues, though…. Read more »

Arduino: running hard to stand still

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 »

ESP8266 IoT room thermometer – part 4: the code

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 »

ESP8266 IoT room thermometer – part 3

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 »

ESP8266 IoT room thermometer – part 2

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 »

ESP8266 IoT room thermometer – part 1

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 »