Category Archives: Internet of Things


ESP8266 internet radio

Tom Tobback built an ESP8266 internet radio based off Edzelf’s excellent Esp-radio project. It uses NodeMCU ESP8266 board for connecting to various internet radio stations and the VS1053 module for decoding the mp3 stream. A TFT display is used in the project to show relevant information such as which radio station is being played. The firmware for ESP8266 is developed using Arduino IDE. The radio also features a built-in web server to allow the user to configure settings and add/modify favorite radio stations. The radio box has a volume control knob and 2 push buttons for channel up and down functions.

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A simple solar-powered IoT weather station

BME280 is a fully integrated environmental unit from Bosch that combines sensors for pressure, humidity, and temperature in a tiny 8-pin metal-lid LGA package of size 2.5 x 2.5 x 0.93 mm³. Because of its compact size, ease of use (BME280 supports standard I2C and SPI interfaces), and availability of supporting open-source Arduino libraries, BME280 is very popular among weather enthusiasts. We have seen its usage in our weather webserver project and standalone weather station tutorial before. This Instructable describes a similar weather station based on ESP8266 and BME280 and is solar-powered. The entire circuit is housed inside a 3-D printed enclosure.

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ForEx: A compact desktop widget for foreign exchange rates display

ForEx is a cute little desktop widget designed by Stefan for displaying major foreign exchange rates and the time of different locations using ESP8266. The time zone references are fetched a bit complicated but this method works and deliver accurate results. Further it allows using the effective name of the city which makes easier to use. In a first step the coordinates of the desired city are evaluated using the API of openweathermap.org. This works by sending the name of the city in a format like “Sydney,au” to the API which will response with its coordinates. In the second step the

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IoT Energy Meter

This cloud-connected energy meter works in conjunction with the regular household power meter to provide detailed information about the electricity usage at home. Modern power meters have a LED blinking every time a watt-hour is used, the IEM detects these flashes using a interrupt, counts them, then the data is stored to the cloud. Usually power companies provide very rough electricity usage data, the IEM provides data with a minute resolution. Knowing the household electricity usage allows to extrapolate statistics and can give precise numbers about the costs.

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