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

Installing the Arduino IDE for the ESP8266


Now that we have completely set up the hardware for the ESP8266, we are ready to configure it using the Arduino IDE.

The most basic way to use the ESP8266 module is to use serial commands, as the chip is basically a Wi-Fi/Serial transceiver. However, this is not convenient and this is not what I recommend doing.

What I recommend is simply using the Arduino IDE, which you will need to install on your computer. This makes it very convenient to use the ESP8266 chip, as we will be using the well-known Arduino IDE, so this is the method that we will use in the entire book.

We are now going to configure your ESP8266 chip using the Arduino IDE. This is a great way to use the chip, as you will be able to program it using the well-known Arduino IDE and also re-use several existing Arduino libraries.

If this is not done yet, install the latest version of the Arduino IDE. You can get it from http://www.arduino.cc/en/main/software.

Now, you need to take a follow steps to be able to configure the ESP8266 with the Arduino IDE:

  1. Start the Arduino IDE and open the Preferences window.

  2. Enter the following URL into the Additional Board Manager URLs field: http://arduino.esp8266.com/stable/package_esp8266com_index.json

  3. Open Boards Manager from the Tools | Board menu and install the esp8266 platform as shown here: