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Do you have these moments when you start to realize that something you just created is gonna be a game changer, at least for you but maybe also for others? Last week I had such a moment when I decided to follow up on an …
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I am very happy to announce that the 2.9″ ESPaper module is now ready for your pre-orders in two versions.
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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 …
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It’s been a while since my last post, but I have been working hard on improving the WeatherStation Color. Read here the engineering challenges I had to overcome and how I solved them
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The CJMCU-530 is a breakout module featuring the VL53L0X by ST Microelectronics which is a laser-ranging sensor for distances of up to 200cm. The module works without problems with the ESP8266 which makes it an interesting option for your next IoT project.
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After many hours of work I’m very happy to finally publish all the sources for the ESP8266 PlaneSpotter project. It is not yet really in a V1.0.0 state but I’m sure with the help of the community it will quickly get better. While this post is …
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More than two months ago I started the process to have my ESP8266 WeatherStation listed on Amazon. The big online platform offers a service called Fulfilled by Amazon or short FBA which allows you to send your items directly to their warehouse. Your product will …
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If you don’t mind code which is a little bit rough around the edges you can start experimenting with the code for the color weather station. I just published it on Github. You can find it here: https://github.com/squix78/esp8266-weather-station-color
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As first task for the upcoming Weather Station Color project I wanted to adapt my online font generator. Easily creating fonts in various sizes will make work on the Weather Station code a lot easier. Since my own display library doesn’t support the color TFT …
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Yesterday I started playing around with a TFT color display connected to the ESP8266. First I adapted example code to download BMP files to the flash memory, and boy, this display has some nice intense colors!
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I received a few complaints that users couldn’t get the Platformio IDE running since the security software detected it as malicious software. So I added the code also to the WeatherStation library as a demo project.
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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 …
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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 …
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In this project I will show you how you can build yourself a fancy Withings-like body scale. I divided the article into two parts: Part 1 describes the hardware hack and Part 2 the software. In this project I used a cheap scale I bought in the …
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When I sit at my living room table I can see wonderful big airplanes in the final approach to Zurich (ZRH) airport or ascending to a far destination: Airbus A380 or Boeing B777 are ingenious proof of what we are capable to design and build. Quite often when …
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Inspired by Mike Rankin’s (@mikerankin) beautiful crossovers between an ESP8266 ESP-01 and an 0.96 Inch OLED I2C display I decided to try if there wasn’t an easy hack to marry the two components with as little soldering as possible.
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The “ESP8266 OLED SSD1306″ is an open source library which allows you to control those pretty OLED modules from our beloved ESP8266 module. Fabrice Weinberg cleaned up all the ugly pieces of code which I initially wrote caused by my near C/C++ illiteracy. He also added support for …
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The integration of the ESP8266 framework into the Arduino IDE brought ease of use for development. This was further improved when firmwares could be pushed over the local network to the test devices with the direct over-the-air feature. But what if your ESP8266 devices are …
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The sensor I’m going to talk about here is a very powerful one. And you actually might have a very similar one in your home somewhere. The DF Robot Positioning IR Camera uses the same or similar module that is built into the Nintendo Wiimote …
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The ESP8266 took the hearts of the IoT and Do-It-Yourself community by storm, due the very attractive price, its internet connectivity and due to the relatively rich amount of available GPIO pins. But an internet connected device is not worth much without means to interact with …
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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 …
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@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
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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!
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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. …
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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! …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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!
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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If you want to engage with your ESP8266 into robotics there is now an almost ready-to-go solution: the NodeMCU Motor Shield. If my research is correct then it was the Doctors of Intelligence & Technology (http://doit.am/) who created it and also are offering some LUA …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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Twice a year the company I work for (Netcetera) organizes a retreat for programmers, usually in the mountains. In the Spring issue this year we went to a resort in a beautiful mountain region. Inspired by the wonderful landscape I managed to write a library …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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Checkout my presentation about IoT:
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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, …
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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 …
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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, …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …