I’m back on the micro-controller pace again!
This time I’ve got myself some new ones called NodeMCU
Some advantages with this one compared to Arduino is that it’s got an onboard Wifi (802.11b/g/n)
and it’s processing about 15% faster.
NodeMCU, an open IoT platform
It’s got the ESP8266 and It can hold different firmwares, Lua or Arduino
One can use the Arduino IDE and the Arduino C/C++ compiling language.
It’s just fabulous!
You can quickly get this talking to the internet, and especially your Phone by using Arduino IDE and Blynk
The Blynk app and framework is also open source, and you can choose to use their Cloud services or host it on your own server.
I decided to host the Blynk server on a Raspberry pi, and it is talking the talk right away!
Some really nifty thought and programming has been layed down in this framework and libraries for really a lot of micro-controllers, this software is so versatile.
Great advantage is that you don’t have to program your own phone App, great stuff is already there for you, -the wheels don’t need to be re-invented 🙂
Use almost whatever micro-controller or sensors; Raspberry Pi GPIO ports, Arduino, nodeMCU etc.
Check out the supported hardware
Drag-and drop phone interface, open source.
Great examples for board specific code at https://examples.blynk.cc
No , I am not a sales-guy!
Do we need more things? -No.
Is IoT for real? -this is up to you!
Have fun:)
Update 2020:
Home Assistant, the way to go if you want to “orchestrate” your home and devices into a lovely symphony.
Use ESPHome add-on and compile a bin for your NodeMCU.
Upload this to your device with the esphomeflasher (need Python3 and PIP3) https://github.com/esphome/esphome-flasher
From there on, you upgrade your NodeMCU config OTA (Over the Air)