A bunch of stuff from eBay turned up at last. I probably won't have to buy a coloured SIL header ever again. More ESP8266s. Some teeny tiny PIR modules which only have a 10mm dia. Some soil moisture sensors and some USB to ttl serial converters.

Sonoffs have arrived from itead.cc to play with!

I came across these cheap solar LED garden lights and immediately knew what I needed to do. They needed to be individually addressable, RGB and controllable from IOT and from an app! =) Probably ESP8266 at this stage with ws2812 LEDs.

I have upgraded the firmware and buck converter in the PIR plugpack project. The new code makes use of a ws2812 to display it's status. I have run the LED out on a very thin enamelled copper flywire so that I can use the inside of the PIR dome as a diffuser. It sits out of the line of sight of the pyroelectric sensor.

Playing with the battery powered ESP8266 project again. I've got it down to 9mA. Unfortunately the minium current draw is raised a long way by the buck converter board I have which is rated for 3A - it's much heavier duty than it needs to be and isn't very efficient.

I decided to unwrap these old BP Solar panels and see what they could do. I built a basic SLA charging circuit that would allow an SLA battery to be charged and to supply power to an ESP8266. This will be for use outdoors as a weather station "or something". I haven't decided yet. Mostly I just wanted to see if the solar panels that I've had for over a decade still worked.

Internet Enabled Night Light. I made this out of an old wall wart and an ESP8266 SOC module. Basically took the guts out of the wall wart and replaced them with the contents of a much more modern wall wart (smaller) which left space for the ESP8266 module, the PIR sensor and other bits. The device uses MQTT to communicate trigger events and periodic measurements to a custom cloud service.

• Temperature - DHT11
• Humidity - DHT11
• Brightness - LDR (Light Dependent Resistor)
• Movement - PIR Module (DSN-FIR800)

Gallery

Here is a small ESP8266 prototype using a DHT11 and an LDR for light level sensing. This module is super convenient; it has USB to RS232 integrated and also has standard spacing so it can be put into a bread board.

Had a mate around today for a BBQ and we built some sensors and wrote some code for the ESP8266.

I bought a few of these cheap ESP8266-12 modules from eBay. I'm pretty impressed so far with how easy it is to get a simple web server up and running.

Key learnings:

• The module has a number of IO pins which must have set state to run and another state to flash. GPIO0 needs to be tied low to flash.
• Needs hundreds of mA - can't run from USB->RS232 converter power.
• minicom (linux) doesn't send the required CRLF to the module. Have to manually use CTRL+M, CTRL+J
• Needs to be flashed with NodeMCU firmware to use LUA

python esptool.py --port /dev/ttyUSB0 write_flash 0x00000 ../Downloads/nodemcu_integer_0.9.6-dev_20150704.bin