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

Chapter 13. Building Your Own Cloud Platform to Control ESP8266 Devices

In all the previous chapters of this book, we have always used external services to connect our ESP8266 projects to the cloud. For example, we used services such as IFTTT, Adafruit IO, and aREST to control and monitor our projects from the cloud.

However, those services are all managed by other people or companies. This can pose security issues for some projects, and also those services can be shut down at any time, or at least not be managed properly. If you really want to have complete control over your cloud connected projects, the only way to go is to deploy your own server on the cloud.

This is exactly what we are going to do in this chapter. We are going to first create a cloud server so we can deploy web applications that can be accessed from anywhere. We are then going to discover how to deploy your own aREST cloud server on the server you just created. Finally, as a test, we'll connect a simple ESP8266 project...