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 4. Control Devices from Anywhere

In the previous chapter, we saw how to make measurements with the ESP8266 chip, and send this data to the web. We saw how to log this data on the cloud, and display it inside a dashboard that can be accessed from anywhere.

In this chapter, we are going to see the reverse situation: how can we control devices from anywhere in the world? We will see that it requires using a different protocol than the classical HTTP, called MQTT.

MQTT can be difficult to use; this is why we will use a library that I created, called aREST, which will simplify the whole process. aREST only uses some of the powerful features of MQTT, but it will be more than enough here to control devices from anywhere.

We will see two examples in this chapter: how to dim an LED and how to control a lamp, both from anywhere in the world. We will see how to do that using a dashboard in the cloud.

At the end of this project, you will be able to control a lamp connected to your ESP8266 chip with...