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

Receiving notifications when the lock is opened


Controlling the lock from the cloud is great, but you can only find out its current state by opening the dashboard on your computer or mobile phone. But what if you are on the road, and the lock is attached to a quite important door in your home? You would want to be alerted when the door is opened.

This is exactly what we are going to do now using IFTTT. We are going to set up the board so it sends notifications to your smartphone when the door lock is opened:

  1. First, go to IFTTT, and add two channels if that's not been done yet: the Maker channel and the Pushover channel. Also install the Pushover app on your smartphone. To learn more about this, refer to the Chapter 7, Sending Notifications from the ESP8266.

  2. Then, create a new recipe, and choose the Maker channel as the trigger:

  3. We need to use the Maker channel here, as it will allow us to use custom projects like ours with IFTTT. As the trigger for the channel, put the lock_opened event:

  4. As the...