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

The aREST cloud server code


It's now time to actually deploy an application on the server that you just created. As the software for your cloud server, we are going to use the aREST cloud server that we have already used before.

It is completely free and open source, and you can get the latest version of the software from here:

https://github.com/marcoschwartz/meteor-aREST-mqtt

For now, simply copy all the files from this repository and put them inside any folder on your computer.

Note

This application actually uses the Meteor framework, which is a complete framework based on JavaScript and Node.js and can be used to create powerful web applications.

If it's not been done yet, install Meteor on your computer by going to:

https://www.meteor.com/install

Now, let's have a quick overview of the code of the aREST cloud server. The code is quite complicated, but I just wanted to highlight some parts here so you understand how it works.

Whenever a device connects to the server, the software first checks...