Since the first house was built, man has made a conscious effort to improve it, to make it more comfortable and safe. Home automation or domotics has been around since decades in terms of lighting and simple appliance control and only recently has technology caught up for the idea of the interconnected world, allowing full control of your home from anywhere, to become a reality.
ESP8266 is a low-priced chip that allows you to build home automation system effectively. This book will demonstrate a few easy-to-implement home automation projects ranging from controlling a relay, to reading all kinds of parameters such as temperature, humidity, light, or presence. It also allows you to send the values from your ESP8266 modules to your private cloud. More than that, you will design and build a secure cloud and a mobile application that can bring comfort and safety at your fingertips. By the end of this book, you will be capable of building your own interconnected devices for better living.
There are many choices available in the market and you can choose your own ESP8266 module based on your project needs. Some of the widely accepted home automation projects are building a portable environmental monitor, wireless remote LCD, Air Gesture AC Dimmer/Switch, Wi-Fi Smart Garage Door, IoT Air Freshener, and internet-enabled smoke alarm.
Home automation is definitely here to stay as it continues to fill the needs of consumers who are looking for better ways to access information and control the home environment. With home automation, you can control your device the way you want.
Chapter 1, Getting Started with the ESP8266, covers the basics of the ESP8266 Wi-Fi chip, including how to choose a module, and how to configure the ESP8266 chip. You will learn how to configure the ESP8266 board, so it can be used for the rest of the book. You will know how to choose the right ESP8266 module as there are many choices available on the market. After that, you will learn the basics of the ESP8266 Wi-Fi chip, and learn how to read data from a sensor connected to the chip.
Chapter 2, Building and Configuring Your Own MQTT Server, speaks about building and configuring an MQTT server to be used with the ESP8266. The chapter will instruct you on how to get, compile, install, and configure an MQTT server to be used in the chapters as a central MQTT gateway.
Chapter 3, Building a Home Thermostat with the ESP8266, covers how to build a home thermostat using the ESP8266. You will learn how to measure the temperature in your home using a thermostat, how to display this temperature on a screen, and also how to adjust the temperature according to your wishes.
Chapter 4, Control Appliances from the ESP8266, shows how to control home appliances that are often present in a house, such as lamps, LEDs, and other appliances. You will learn how to control several home appliances using only the ESP8266 Wi-Fi chip. Thanks to the Wi-Fi connectivity of the chip, you will be able to control all the appliances remotely.
Chapter 5, Using ESP8266 to Build a Security System, covers how to build a complete security system based on the ESP8266. You will learn how to connect to your ESP8266 module's elements that are necessary to a security system, such as motion detectors, cameras, and alarms. You will then be able to build a complete security system based on these elements.
Chapter 6,Securing Your Data, This chapter is about adding SSL to secure communication between the ESP8266 modules and broker. You will learn to encrypt the packets in order to secure the data and make sure that your communication remains private.
Chapter 7,Real-Time communication, there are some use cases where you need to see data retrieved from the sensors in real time, to log the values in a database or to show them on a nice graph.
Chapter 8, Adding a Mobile Application to Your Smart Home, to complete the journey in the smart home world and have your house in control from your phone, you will create an Android mobile application.
In order to start working with ESP8266, you will need a series of software and hardware components. The ESP8266 chip and its module, sensors like ADXL345, temperature sensors, PIR sensors, and cables, soldering tools. In every chapter, I've tried to make a good picture and provide the good description.
For the software, we would require PC with Windows and VirtualBox installed. For application Arduino IDE with at least 1.5.3 SDK version for the ESP8266, Lubuntu Linux 16.04 installed in Virtual Box, Docker installed in Virtual Box, InfluxDB and Grafana installed in Virtual Box.
This book is for people who want to build connections and inexpensive home automation projects using the ESP8266 Wi-Fi chip, and to completely automate their homes. A basic understanding of the board would be an added advantage.
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "The following is the setup() function to connect to the Wi-Fi network."
A block of code is set as follows:
#include <ESP8266WiFi.h> #include <JsonListener.h> #include "WundergroundClient.h"
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
sudo openssl rsa -in ca.crt -out newca.pemNew terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "Click on Sign in to network."
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