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

Hardware and software requirements


The first thing we need for this project is the ESP8266 Wi-Fi chip. As for most of this book, I will be using the Adafruit Huzzah ESP8266 board here.

Then, the other important component for this project will be the robot platform. There are many options on the market, but there are actually not so many that are made for the ESP8266, so we will need to choose a very generic platform that we can just mount the components of our choosing on.

We basically need a certain amount of features to have a robot platform for this project:

  • The platform needs to have at least two wheels

  • The platform needs to have two motors

  • The platforms needs to be big enough to host the ESP8266, a breadboard, and batteries

There are actually a large number of robot platforms that would work with those specifications. The first category is of course the simple two-wheeled robot kits, such as this kit from EmGreat:

These platforms just have two wheels with a motor on each, and then a free wheel...