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

Online Bitcoin services


Before starting with online Bitcoin services, we need to know how to actually get the current price (in US dollars) of Bitcoin.

On the Web, it's quite easy to get the price or the historical value of Bitcoin. For example, a good website to look at is Coindesk:

http://www.coindesk.com/price/

On this website, you have access to the current price of Bitcoin, and also nice graphs showing the historical value of Bitcoin:

That's nice, but it is only accessible via the website and it's too complicated anyway for our little ESP8266 board.

A better solution is simply to have what is called a Bitcoin ticker that just displays the real-time value of Bitcoin. A good example of such a ticker can be found at the following URL:

http://preev.com/btc/usd

You will see the current value of Bitcoin, which you can display in multiple currencies:

That's what we want to build for our project: a simple Bitcoin ticker that displays the current value of Bitcoin in USD.

However, we can't access...