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

Reading data from a digital sensor


In this last section of this chapter, we are going to connect a digital sensor to our ESP8266 chip, and read data from it. As an example, we will use a DHT11 sensor, which can be used to get ambient temperature and humidity.

You will need to get this component for this section, the DHT11 sensor (https://www.adafruit.com/products/386)

Let's now connect this sensor to your ESP8266:

  1. First, place the sensor on the breadboard. Then, connect the first pin of the sensor to VCC, the second pin to pin 5 of the ESP8266, and the fourth pin of the sensor to GND.

    This is what it will look like at the end:

    Note

    Note that here I've used another ESP8266 board, the Adafruit ESP8266 breakout board. I will use this board in several chapters of this book.

    We will also use the aREST framework in this example, so it's easy for you to access the measurements remotely. aREST is a complete framework to control your ESP8266 boards remotely (including from the cloud), and we are going to...