ESP8266

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I recently learned about the ESP8266 and have become quite fascinated. I was able to pick up a board locally for about $10 (but online, they are only a few dollars) and after connecting a simple temperature and humidity sensor was able to get it pushing sensor data over WiFi to Mango running in AWS (via a free online MQTT broker) in really no time.

Has anyone else been playing with these units and done anything interesting? As a standalone sensor, or remote IO, they are very interesting, but I wonder if anyone has come up with any really creative applications - like using them as a modbus-TCP to Serial gateway, or implementing some sort of logging and syncing with Mango?

Best
Jeremy

I do know of someone using these for wireless temp sensors and making a http post to Mango. They do seem like a really powerful device. I talked to them about the idea of doing a TCP to serial converter with them and they seemed to think this would be possible but we didn't take it any further.

With your setup did you use the Mango MQTT Data Source?

Hi Jeremy,

I was curious, did you use the Arduino environment and the pubsubclient library? Also, which sensor did you use? The DHT-11?

Bit

Modbus IP on a ESP8266 works well. I have about 50 of them with a BME280 module supplying temperature, humidity and pressure to my Mango systems.

ModbusIP_ESP8266.h

@JoelHaggar said in ESP8266:

With your setup did you use the Mango MQTT Data Source

Yes; The ESP8266 is publishing temperature, humidity and an analogue value (from a light dependent resistor) to a simple free online broker (cloudmqtt.com) and then I configured the MQTT data source to subscribe to messages from the broker.

@bitreaper said in ESP8266:

I was curious, did you use the Arduino environment and the pubsubclient library? Also, which sensor did you use? The DHT-11?

Yes, I used the pubsubclient library and a DHT22 sensor. I just used a basic boilerplate sketch that I found online. I think that my code may need tweaking as it looks like it may create a new connection/socket each time it pushes an update but it's otherwise working fine.

I had hoped that MQTT, or at least the pubsubclient library, would include some sort of provision for store-and-forward or buffering in case of a dropped connection, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Functionally, it seems to offer few advantages over other protocols, but I have yet to really dig in to it. My next small project will be to drive a relay using MQTT and that will pose some interesting questions with respect to maintaining state, discarding old commands, etc.

@Balistar That BME280 module is really interesting! Includes a barometer and according to this article, is much more accurate than the DHT type sensors:

https://www.kandrsmith.org/RJS/Misc/Hygrometers/calib_many.html

Yes, Bosch sensors are excellent. Great documentation, unlike most "Chinese" sensors.

Can't wait to get a BME680. It suppose to sense Volatile Organic Compound gases., as well as temp, humi and pres..