The Color Kit Grande is the latest update of the hardware kits which I started selling back in 2015. It started with the ESP8266 and a tiny B/W OLED display. A little later the ESP8266 Color Kit followed and added a bigger display with resistive touch screen to it. Buyers also had to do a bit of soldering to complete the kit.
perience of setting up an inexpensive room sensor network using an ESP32 and a couple of Xiaomi devices, with the help of the open source project OpenMQTTGateway.
I mostly use EasyEDA for PCB design: it is easy to use and ordering assembled PCBs from JLCPCB couldn’t be easier (and cheaper) with any other EDA tool. But exporting your PCB design from EasyEDA as a 3D object is really faulty. Often we want …
Logic Analyzers can be quite useful to test and analyze hardware. In this short video I explain how to use the cheap LHT00SU1 logic analyzer together with PulseView on Mac OS X to test a new ESP32 development board.
Recently more and more ESP32 hardware is appearing with the WCH CH9102 Serial-To-USB chip. I assume lower costs and higher availability are the reason for this. Lower costs compared to FTDI chips, to the Silicon Labs CP2102 or CP2104. But when I recently started working …
How do you add new virtual devices/commands in Node-Red so that Alexa can control them? There are great Node-Red extensions but things get more complicated if Node-Red is running in a docker container. In this blog post I share my take-aways from setting this up.
If you are lacking good documentation it can be very hard to get started with a new device. I just couldn’t find a comprehensive example project for how to connect TTGO-LoRA32 V1.0 with the V3 version of the Things Network. So I hope this post …
The ESP32 platform offers a wide range of functionality almost out of the box. For instance you can turn a ESP32 with little effort into a Bluetooth Audio speaker. In this article I describing how I tapped into the digital data stream coming from a …
Fritzing is a wonderful tool to document your electronic projects, if – and only if – the parts you use are available in the parts library. If you are designing parts yourself you can help the community by creating Fritzing parts for your designs.
I love machines that help me to build my projects. I also love to hack devices to do more than they were built for. So you can imagine what a fun project it was for me to hack my desktop 3018 CNC mill into a …
Recently I was asked: “What do you need a development board for?” For me the answer is very clear. I love short development cycles. It’s much faster to verify an idea on a bread board before you sit down and design a PCB. Designing a …
My family and I live in an apartment building and the laundry machine and the tumble dryer are in the basement. In the past, it happened many times that I went down to take out the laundry just to realize that the machine was still …
I’m constantly adding new features to my Tevo Tarantula printer. The latest addition is a bed leveling sensor.
In the last few years blog.squix.org has grown from a personal idea dumping ground to a well visited page around maker projects. Two years ago I started looking for a way to make it easier for you to rebuild my projects. The first step was to provide links …
With the last production batch we secretly updated the ESP8266 WeatherStation Color Kit. First change is the increased size of the custom PCB, which now has the same size as the TFT board. We also added holes and two spacers and female headers so that …
Hi Sergey, thank you so much much for agreeing to this interview! Can you tell us a bit about your role at Mongoose OS? I am a technical cofounder and CTO of a company behind Mongoose OS, and set the overall technical direction for the …
If you are looking for a fun project for your next weekend then the DSO150 Oscilloscope from JYE Tech might be the right thing for you. It is a kit which requires basic soldering skills, 1-2 hours of work and some concentration.
It was about time that I would offer you a better way to ask me questions than post comments and a contact form on the About page. Thanks to the nude of one reader I finally picked a forum software and set it up.
In this post I will show you how to replace the batteries of an Anki Overdrive car either to increase the capacity or to fix a broken LiPo pack. But first a warning: this process will most likely void your warranty. Only do this if …
In my last post I shared my impressions from the first day of the Internet-of-Things conference in Munich. Here is the write-up of day 2 which covers a low-cost smart home, Docker for Internet-of-Things running on ARM (Raspberry Pi’s), introduction to Web Bluetooth and a comparison …
Munich is always worth a trip and you can get there from Zurich easily by train or coach. This time my employer Netcetera let me visit the Internet-of-Things conference to scout what is going on in the IoT field in Germany (and elsewhere). Here are …
You might not know it but the most important puzzle piece for all my recent ESP8266 projects is a thing called a streaming parser. Keep reading if you want to know what that is, how it works and why it is so important for my ESP8266 …
Once in a while I like to try out new ways to reach the audience. I’m happy to present the ESP8266 Weather Station: Getting Started Guide is now available for Kindle. If you are a frequent reader of this blog you might recognise some content …
The 0.96″ OLED displays I usually use for the WeatherStation are gorgeous but they could be bigger, right? Recently a bigger version of the SSD1306 based display became available on my favourite channels. Thanks to great work of the community (especially Fabrice Weinberg) the OLED …
Having tools is great but you also need to know how to use them. Being a native Java speaker using a debugger is a very natural and easy thing. With the ESP8266 on the other hand this looks a bit different. I struggled now for …
@WaldyWiz designed a wonderful case for the ESP8266 WeatherStation which you can lasercut yourself. Thank you for sharing!Got inspired? Order the development kit here: https://blog.squix.org/product/weatherstation-kit-w-white-oled for US $24.50 Resources https://wizbrewery.wordpress.com/2016/02/21/iot-laser-cut-case/ https://github.com/wizbrewery/iot-laser-cut-case
As you might know already I am now a proud owner of a 3D printer, a Printrbot Play. In the last few weeks I have tried to master the printer and I have learned a lot in this time. It was only a matter of …
After pondering over buying a 3D printer for almost a year I finally had ordered a Printrbot Play at the end of last year and about 3 weeks later it arrived in Switzerland in a pretty package at my door. In this post I’d like …
Yesterday my Printrbot Play finally arrived after 3 Weeks since I gave the order. After hesitating for a long time I finally made the order on december 31, then on January 11 it was shipped and 9 days later on January 20 it arrived at …
The Arduino IDE is a good choice for a beginner to get into the world of small embedded devices. Feedback that I got from Weather Station Users indicates that the ESP8266 attracts many hobbyists to the IoT field that before had little experience with programming …
Today I discovered a new ESP8266 based product on Banggood which looks quite interesting: the SONOFF (maybe short for switch on/off?) from ITead Studio which is a WiFi controllable switch in a nice and safe case for between USD $4.85 – 9. Not bad! Obviously I …
Dennis van Elteren sent me this wonderful WeatherStation case project. If you want to print this yourself you can download the .stl files from here: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/a6692237ysiwj7m/AAARxjrN0PK5s8WQT_SeEBeIa?dl=0 Thank you Dennis for sharing!
<Measuring Inside and Outside Part 1 In Part 1 of this series you learned how to connect a DHT temperature/humidity sensor directly to your WeatherStation and to display the readings as an additional frame in the carousel rotation. In this second part I will show …
Today I got a wonderful email from Jens Lochmüller from Germany which shows that necessity is truly the mother of invention. He wanted to build a case for the Weather Station with a picture frame but since he didn’t have an unused one at home …
Just in time for the beginning of the new year I added a demo for the WeatherStation which displays various world times together with a pretty icon. Just update the WeatherStation library in your Arduino IDE to the latest version or download it manually from …
Measuring Inside and Outside Temperature – Part 2> The code you get with the WeatherStation (https://github.com/squix78/esp8266-weather-station) is meant as a starting point for beginners and enthusiasts to display information. So far there are modules to get correct time from the internet as well as current …
Just had a little time to test my latest idea. I took an IKEA picture frame, mirrored car tint and the Weather station, put everything together and it works! It only took about 30 minutes… Next time I’ll have to be more careful with the …
While I have a few days off I found some time to finally get a consistent set of libraries for the WeatherStation together and fix a few things. Here is a summary of the changes… Weather Station as a library Most important change from my …
Many people were asking me to publish the code that creates the font files used in the SSD1306 OLED library. Well, I was hesitating since the code was a bit hacky. So I sat down and created an online tool which is now open for …
This is a quick preview of my next ESP8266 project in the pipeline: The FairyBox. Planned features: (Planned) Features Simple song selection with big buttons: button 1 selects folder one, first song, press button 1 again and it jumps to second song in folder 1. …
Santa came early this year! Espressif has sent me one of the early test boards of the new kid in IoT town, the ESP32. Compared to the ESP8266 which kind of dominated the hacker space in the last 12 months the ESP32 is very powerful! …
I got a few complaints that the esp8266-oled-ssd1306 library does not handle special characters such as Umlauts properly. It turns out that the Arduino IDE does handle characters in the extended ASCII range (from 128-256) as UTF8 characters which means that Strings containing such characters can …
Recently I released a new version of the esp8266-oled-ssd1306 library. This library allows you to control these wonderful little displays from a ESP8266 with little effort. When I first wrote the library for the WeatherStation I had the problem that 128×64 pixels never seemed enough space …
Several ESP8266 hackers contacted me to finally publish the new WeatherStation code. Here it is: https://github.com/squix78/esp8266-weather-station It is not yet working as smoothly as I want it to work but maybe some of you can help me getting rid of the nasty issues that were …
The Weather Station code comes with a clock, current conditions such as temperature, humidity, pressure and precipitation, as well as a 3 day weather forecast. Get a glimpse here: Want to get one yourself? Order one in the shop!
I’m working on a new version of the Weather Station code. The first shot was the jason-streaming-parser library which allows me to fetch bigger objects directly from the source without the need of an proxy PHP script. The next step is to add more features …
For a while now I wanted to improve my weather station project by adding more sources of information that can be displayed. But these sources I had in mind either used SSL (https) or delivered huge JSON responses. SSL is not yet supported on the …
It is Sunday morning and I’m laying in bed and reading the news. Then there is a article on lifehacker.com which shows the following picture: Adafruit Weather Station Display based on my code And I thought that looks exactly like my weather station code for the …
As I showed with the Long Term data logger test you can run an ESP8266 for almost three months and post temperature and humidity every 10minutes to the internet from 3AA batteries. But 3AA batteries are quite spacious and fitting them and the ESP8266 into …
I recently stumbled on a feature that hopefully soon will be integrated into the stable release of the ESP8266/Arduino environment: a file system interface. Low-Level: EEPROM Up until now and currently your best bet for data persistence in the stable release you could use the …
You might have realised that I’m recently into scales and load cells. So I couldn’t help but trying to build my very own Wifi body scale. Since the ones from Withings easily can cost $150 my goal was not only to build one myself but to …
While the first WeatherStation Kits are just about to reach their eager recipients I was working hard to create a complete and hopefully beginner friendly setup guide for it. Stay tuned for more chapters and more experiments and projects you can do with this starter …
In the last couple of months I could collect some experience in where to buy the electronic components I use in my projects. Since in most cases I don’t care so much about several weeks of delivery time I usually order from one of several …
Yesterday evening the ESP8266 the data logger connected for the last time to Thingspeak and posted temperature and humidity. It has reported these values every 10 minutes for 2045 hours or in other words 85 days. This is nearly 3 months! ESP8266 posting temperature and …
This was my first take ever at designing something for a 3D printer. Since I didn’t have a 3D printer available with a big enough printing area I ordered it online at Sculpteo.com. And only a few days after my order I received a nice …
Great news! My supplier in China has finally sourced all the components that come with the WeatherStation Kit and I’m ready to take your orders. For a limited time it will cost only USD $19.95 and shipping is available for more than 70 countries. The …
More than 1440 hours or in other words 60 days ago I put 3 AA batteries from IKEA in the battery box of the ESP8266 test board and started a program that would send temperature and humidity every 10 minutes to Thingspeak through its Wifi …
It’s amazing what you can do with just a few components: a load cell, a high gain analog-to-digtal converter and a NodeMCU module. You can for instance measure the water consumption of your dear plants. If you combine the previous mentioned components with a OLED …
In my last post I talked about my self made scale. There are plenty of applications for a sensor that can sense the weight of things. But I guess the scale should not be tared (or set to zero) every time the ESP8266 wakes up …
This week I finally received all the necessary pieces to build a internet connected kitchen scale. The ingredients are: a load cell (Wikipedia), a high resolution ADC (HX711) and of course a ESP8266 based NodeMCU V1.0 module. For the moment I’m not logging the data …
I’m very happy to announce that I could find a supplier who will ship all the parts that you need to get started with the WeatherStation. No more worries to find the right components. The WeatherStation Kit will contain: the new improved NodeMCU V1.0 with …
This post is due for a while now but I had so much fun actually using the NodeMCU that I totally forgot (or postponed) to write a review about it. So, let’s get started: The new NodeMCU V1.0 Dev Kit module Image Source: https://github.com/nodemcu/nodemcu-devkit-v1.0 The first …
This is a total make over of the earlier weather station. Instead of building my code on the NodeMCU lua firmware I decided to switch to the Arduino IDE based development setup. The reason for this was the constant problems with heap memory running out …
So, all the major technical challenges have been resolved. But now the fine tuning begins. Anyone with a graphical eye in the audience to give advice? How to arrange the different elements most efficiently so that it is pleasant to eye and brain and uses …
These tiny OLED displays are cool, but they are also… well… tiny. To get the most of the screen real estate I started working on a little framework that allows you to display different cards on a carousel, which then are transitioned from one to …
My long term logger test is already running more than 31 days or at the time of writing 750 hours! My pessimistic guess was that the device running from 3 AA batteries would stop running after 30 days. What is your guess? These charts are …
You just got to love open source! Some guys wrote a firmware for an exciting little chip (ESP8266), based on an open sourced SDK: the NodeMCU lua firmware was born. Then another guy (me;-)) writes a little LUA program to fetch weather data from an …
I recently discovered the Node Red tool and almost immediately fell in love. I was about to write something like that myself when I found out about it and so far it does everything the way I would expect it: you could call it if-this-than-that …
Since I learned how to create pictures and display them on these wonderful OLED displays I wanted to build something useful with it. Once you know about all the pieces, putting them together is quite easy. The icon, temperature and humidity are updated every 10 minutes …
Do you know these wonderfully cheap SSD1306 based OLED displays with the crispy display? For a while now the NodeMCU Lua firmware for the ESP8266 supports them and has a rich feature set to draw lines, circles and even bitmaps. One way to draw bitmaps …
Fritzing is a nice tool to quickly draw up your breadboard circuits. From there you can easily and for a competitive price order PCBs. But Fritzing is only fun when you have all the parts that you use in your project. For me the NodeMCU …
My colleague Marcel recently developed a web based tool that lets you choose the modules which will be compiled into the NodeMCU build. This saves you the trouble to setup your own build server with tool chain and can save you a lot of space …
A few days ago a package arrived from SeeedStudio: the new NodeMCU board V1.0 (see picture) The NodeMCU V1.0 (picture from here) On paper it has some nice advantages compared to the old V0.9 version or also to other ESP8266 dev boards: you can directly …
Preview for my augmented reality project: A RaspberryPi with SDR-RTL dongle picks up signals from airplanes in my relative neighbourhood. When an airplane becomes visible from by living room window it sends detailed flight information to 6 modules of 8×8 Led Matrix elements such as …
Today I started a (hopefully) long term battery test with the ESP8266 board I reviewed here. The conditions are: powered by 3 AA batteries (serial) every 10 minutes update temperature and humidity retrieved from a DHT11 to thingspeak go the deep sleep between the posts …
In my last post I showed you how you can run a software defined radio easily on a Mac OS X Yosemite. In just a few more steps you can also track commercial airplanes in your area with the same device you can buy here (affiliate link) …
Today another little package from China waited in my inbox: a DVB-T+FM Tuner. So far not that exciting. Except that this package for $10.99 is capable of receiving a huge spectrum of 24-1766MHz thanks to the powerful tuner inside. The keyword for making this hardware …
In this post I will guide you through the jungle of available modules based on the ESP8266. This is not a complete list of available modules but a selection of the ones I could test and review. If you think that I have been missing …
Introduction I was very excited when the very same group that developed the NodeMcu Lua firmware announced their ESP8266 Dev board. I ordered one from Banggood and yesterday it arrived after more than a month. Quality The PCB seems to be well done. The silk screen …
Today finally a new package from China arrived containing an ESP8266-ESP201 bought on aliexpress. I had ordered two pieces and each came in a little plastic bag and stuck in protective foam. The bag also contained a tiny antenna that can be plugged into the connector …
Checkout my presentation about IoT:
In this post I want to show you what hardware you’ll need in order to get started with the ESP8266. In the post I assume that you have no hardware yet at all. I also assume, that you’re mostly interested in programming the ESP8266 directly, …
Today I received one of those super cheap Oled displays which I bought on Banggood and it was hard to find one single source of help for this tiny display. Maybe this post will help you when you receive yours The module To be sure …
Recently a test board for the ESP8266 ESP-12 arrived. I ordered it on AliExpress and took several weeks to arrive. Since the description was really bad I had to reverse engineers the functions and pins: Pin layout of the test board As you can see the board …
When you get started with wonderful world of the ESP8266 your first step might have been to play around with the AT command firmware. Then you might have chosen one of the pre-built multi purpose firmwares, such as the NodeMCU or the NodeLua image. Then, …
The ESP8266 chip is really something: cheap and with its Wifi interface capable for Internet-of-Things tasks. You can get boards on Aliexpress for as little as $3, shipping to Europe or US included! OK, so you ordered one, waited (possibly) a few weeks and then …
While playing with the ESP8266-ESP01 board I had a lot of problems with random reboots. I had used the 3.3V power supply of my Seeeduino and apparently it could deliver enough power and forced the board to reboot. After a while I ordered one of …
A while ago a wanted to build one of those nightlights for my daughter that tell her when to sleep and when to call for the parents: an orange light behind a sun depicts the day, a blue light behind a moon the night. My …
I just gotten into the mood of trying out firmwares for the ESP8266. There is one that behaves similar to a busybox command line tool. Download the binary from here, flash it to the ESP8266 and connect to it over the serial channel: https://github.com/nekromant/esp8266-frankenstein So far …
After you setup your ESP8266 module as described here you can go on and write Arduino code that talks to the ESP8266 or even flash new firmware directly on the device. Someone has put together a firmware which allows you to send lua code to the …
I recently received two of these shiny new Wifi modules from China and had to test them out. In many posts around the web they say you should use a serial-to-usb adapter to send some AT commands to the module and set it up with …
It took me far too long to get this working, but I finally did it: a small Arduino compatible board called “DevDuino” running on a CR2032 cell battery is sending temperature and battery voltage over the air to another Arduino board which records it. Sounds …
Sadly tunlr ceased to exist – so compared to the setup I described here http://blog.squix.ch/2013/12/use-tunlr-together-with-dnsmasq-on-your.html I had to find a working solution again. But this time I couldn’t find a free dns service anymore, but I wanted to find a cheap one at least. It appears that http://proxydns.co/ does …
Motivation Continuous Deployment is nice: you roll out new versions of your software all the time and not only three, four times a year with your mayor release. And everything automatically. Of course this requires a good coverage of automated unit, integration and UI tests …
Motivation I’m currently working on a foosball web app that is widely used in breaks where I work. While you track the goals made by each of the team the app running on the app engine calculates a ranking of all the players and awards …
Just found a great tutorial for writing angular directives: Here
Tunlr is a replacement DNS service that allows you to watch Netflix and similar services from abroad. The downside is that you have to change your DNS settings to send all traffic to Tunlr. You can do this either on every device you want to …
This blog post nicely describes how to generate Java classes with JAXB to read XML files, given a schema: Using JAXB to Generate Java Objects from XML Document In case you don’t have a schema you can also infer one. This online tool can do …
Do you like to explore all the technical possibilities of your gadgets like me? Sometimes setting up something can consume quite a lot of time. I had a RaspberryPi running for several month as Airplay station now. But since my Boxee is getting more and …
Google’s appengine-maven-plugin is cool. Especially for deploying your app to the cloud. But for developing it can be cumbersome, since the hot deploy mechanism is not very stable and you often have to restart the devserver. Since I wanted to get more into the whole …
In a later blog post I will describe how I am using a TL-MR3020 router as low-cost wifi shield for my Arduino to transmit sensor data over wifi. In this post I just want to show how you can script a restart of the arduino …
JKS to P12 keytool -importkeystore -srckeystore keystore.jks -srcstoretype JKS -deststoretype PKCS12 -destkeystore keystore.p12 P12to JKS keytool -importkeystore -srckeystore keystore.p12 -srcstoretype PKCS12 -deststoretype JKS -destkeystore keystore.jks
The following how-to describes how you can watch Netflix on your boxee even if you are living outside of a country where Netflix is available. First of all you need a Netflix account. For USD 7.99 per month you can watch all their series and …
I was looking for the easiest way to visualize the sensor data my arduino in the basement is sending to the linux server. The server receives a data triple every few seconds which I write to a log file using cat: cat /dev/ttyUSB0 > /var/log/datalogger.log …
Use mvn archetype:create-from-project to create an artefact from an existing project. Have a look in the target folder, where you’ll find the new artefact.
It took me a while to figure this out, but finally I found a solution to load CSS background images for styles defined in a *.ui.xml: Copy the image to the same package as your *.ui.xml In the ui.xml add a “ui:data” tag that points …
August 1st is the national holiday in Switzerland. Having a longer weekend also lets me work more on Feederator. In the last few days Feederator learned some cool new tricks, which I’d like to share with you Public Change Log For the users and my …
Currently there are about 200’000 archived items available in the Feederator database. In the hope to attract more traffic I wanted to make this data available to search engines. But how to make this data available to search engines without putting too much burden on …
I’m using Feederator myself to send interesting posts to my Kindle to read it later. To do this you can simple drill into the detail view of a post. There you’ll find a social bookmarking widget, labled with “share”. In the popup select “more” and …
For a while now Feederator allows some kind of full text queries. When items are read for the first time into the datastore an index will be created. This index is currently a break down of the single words in the title, but can be …
Since this took me a while to figure out I’d like to share with you. I wanted to extend Feederator to send incoming news items to the users XMPP client. What worked pretty fast was sending plain text messages: XMPPService xmpp = XMPPServiceFactory.getXMPPService(); JID jid …
This weekend Feederator learned a lot of new tricks. In my opinion the coolest new thing is that Feederator adds a lot of additional data to each post. You get a website preview in the list with the feed items. In case of movie feeds …
For a while now I have been using the Amazon cloud to render web page previews for posts in Feederator. This solution is running in Amazons new free “beginner” quota. For a low load this works quite well, but it never worked to create a …
At the time of this writing there is no function to delete (unused) your datastore indexes directly with the Java tool set. But there is a way around: the python SDK has a function called vacuum_indexes. This is how your can do it, step by …
I’m trying to improve Feederator.org. Sometimes changes are rather invisible to the end user. Sometimes new features extend the use of feederator rather dramatically. I enabled such a feature today: searching the archives with full text key words. To keep your inbox clean Feederator moves …
Sabnzbd+ is a great tool if you are riding the usenet wave. Feederator on the other hand is a great tool to manage and moderate (RSS) feeds. This post will show you how to use the two tools to have a one click (movie/series/ebook) download …
Since feederator is only a free time project, it takes time to implement all the features that I want feederator to have. I’m stealing here a bit of time, there using a gap between coming home from work and dinner. The guys over at lifehacker …
More and more, the current layout seemed not to be as convenient as we first thought. The layout looked like it was designed with a mobile device in mind, than running nicely on a desktop. But since it is our long term plan to bring …
Did you ever want to control which items of a (RSS) feed should be used by your consumer and which should be ignored? Feederator helps you to organize your feeds, filter specific items or even mix two feeds together to a new one. If not …
We’ve been working on Feederator a while now. It is a great feeling, now that it is finally out for users to try it. But be warned: Feederator is improving constantly. We’re adding features and fixing bugs on a daily basis. If you want to …
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Daniel Eichhorn