Book Image

ESP8266 Home Automation Projects

By : Catalin Batrinu, Constantin Tambrea
Book Image

ESP8266 Home Automation Projects

By: Catalin Batrinu, Constantin Tambrea

Overview of this book

The ESP8266 is a low-cost yet powerful Wi-Fi chip that is becoming more popular at an alarming rate, and people have adopted it to create interesting projects. With this book, you will learn to create and program home automation projects using the ESP8266 Wi-Fi chip. You will learn how to build a thermostat to measure and adjust the temperature accordingly and how to build a security system using the ESP8266. Furthermore, you will design a complete home automation system from sensor to your own cloud. You will touch base on data monitoring, controlling appliances, and security aspects. By the end of the book, you will understand how to completely control and monitor your home from the cloud and from a mobile application. You will be familiar with the capabilities of the ESP8266 and will have successfully designed a complete ready-to-sell home automated system.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
3
Building a Home Thermostat with the ESP8266
5
Using ESP8266 to Build a Security System
Index

Using the WiFiManager library


Until now the SSID and password for connecting the ESP8266 to the Wi-Fi network have been hardcoded in the sketch using these lines:

const char* ssid = "YOUR_WIFI_SSID"; 
const char* password = "YOUR_WIFI_PASSWORD";

To stop using the hardcoded values we need to first start the ESP8266 in AP mode and expose the user as a web interface served by an embedded web server hosted inside the ESP8266.

We will learn how to use the WiFiManager library to expose a configuration web page; we will take the data and save it to a SPIFFS like we did in the previous chapter and use it to start our module in station mode and connect to an MQTT server.

If you didn't install the WiFiManager library in Chapter 1, Getting Started with the ESP8266 you can do it now, going to Sketch | Include Library | Manage libraries and search for wifimanager, as seen in the following screenshot:

Installing the WiFiManager library

After the installation of the library, let's see how you can use it to set...