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 (15 chapters)
14
Index

Chapter 12. Cloud-Controlled ESP8266 Robot

In this book so far, we mainly used the ESP8266 Wi-Fi chip to build Internet of Things projects that were related to the home automation or security fields, such as the remote-controlled door lock, or the complete home automation system we built in Chapter 11, Cloud-Based Home Automation System.

However, the ESP8266 is a very versatile chip, and can be used for several fields other than the two I cited above. For example, it can also be used as the "brain" of a mobile robot, and this is exactly what we are going to do in this chapter.

We are going to build a small mobile robot that will be completely controlled by the ESP8266 Wi-Fi chip. We are going to connect the motors of the robot to the ESP8266 Wi-Fi chip, and then the chip will communicate wirelessly with a cloud platform, so the robot can be controlled from anywhere. Finally, we are going to control the robot from a cloud dashboard. Let's start!