Book Image

Internet of Things with ESP8266

By : Marco Schwartz
Book Image

Internet of Things with ESP8266

By: Marco Schwartz

Overview of this book

The Internet of Things (IoT) is the network of objects such as physical things embedded with electronics, software, sensors, and connectivity, enabling data exchange. ESP8266 is a low cost WiFi microcontroller chip that has the ability to empower IoT and helps the exchange of information among various connected objects. ESP8266 consists of networkable microcontroller modules, and with this low cost chip, IoT is booming. This book will help deepen your knowledge of the ESP8266 WiFi chip platform and get you building exciting projects. Kick-starting with an introduction to the ESP8266 chip, we will demonstrate how to build a simple LED using the ESP8266. You will then learn how to read, send, and monitor data from the cloud. Next, you’ll see how to control your devices remotely from anywhere in the world. Furthermore, you’ll get to know how to use the ESP8266 to interact with web services such as Twitter and Facebook. In order to make several ESP8266s interact and exchange data without the need for human intervention, you will be introduced to the concept of machine-to-machine communication. The latter part of the book focuses more on projects, including a door lock controlled from the cloud, building a physical Bitcoin ticker, and doing wireless gardening. You’ll learn how to build a cloud-based ESP8266 home automation system and a cloud-controlled ESP8266 robot. Finally, you’ll discover how to build your own cloud platform to control ESP8266 devices. With this book, you will be able to create and program Internet of Things projects using the ESP8266 WiFi chip.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Internet of Things with ESP8266
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Connecting the robot to the cloud


Now that we are sure that the wheels are working correctly, we are going to connect the robot to the aREST cloud platform, so it can be controlled from anywhere in the world.

As the sketch is quite big and takes a lot from the motor test sketch we saw earlier, I will only go through the most important points here. You can of course find the complete sketch inside the GitHub repository for the book.

It starts by importing the correct libraries:

#include <ESP8266WiFi.h>
#include <PubSubClient.h>
#include <aREST.h>

Then, we create the client to communicate with the aREST cloud server:

WiFiClient espClient;
PubSubClient client(espClient);

We also create an instance of the aREST client:

aREST rest = aREST(client);

Then, as we saw in earlier chapters, you need to give a unique ID to the device:

char* device_id = "40ep12";

You also need to set your Wi-Fi name and password here:

const char* ssid = "wifi-name";
const char* password = "wifi-password";

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