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Heart rate monitoring over the internet using ESP8266

Posted on February 26, 2017 by R-B 4 comments

With the rapid development and maturing of internet-of-things (IoT) technology, the IoT-driven smart sensors and systems are changing business in multiple industries. In healthcare industry, it is gaining more attention lately because of its immense potential in reducing the cost of tracking health information, as well as in providing health care to people who were not able to receive it before. This project describes a simple remote heart rate monitoring system based on the ESP8266 platform and the Easy Pulse Plugin sensor module. The ESP8266 reads in the analog photoplethysmograph (PPG) output from the Easy Pulse sensor, computes the heart beat rate in real time,

Tutorial 8: ESP8266 Internet clock

Posted on February 8, 2017 by R-B 4 comments

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) provides official time in the United States. NIST disseminates the time using several methods, including radio broadcasting over short-wave and long-wave frequencies, telephone dial-in services (ACTS), and Network Time Service (NTS) over the internet. This tutorial describes how to build an ESP8266-based internet clock that uses NIST’s NTS service to retrieve accurate time information. The time is displayed on a colorful TFT LCD (ILI9341 driven) in both analog clock dial and digital formats. The time is synchronized to the NIST server in every 2-minute interval. Hardware This project uses an ESP8266 module to connect to

Tutorial 6: ESP8266 and BME280 make a local/remote weather station

Posted on February 5, 2017 by R-B 2 comments

In previous tutorials, we explored how to connect an SSD1306-based I2C OLED to ESP8266 for displaying texts and graphics, as well as to setup an ESP8266-based web server. This tutorial combines the knowledge gained before to make a standalone weather station that will display the local weather data on an OLED screen. In addition, the weather station will also run a web server that would allow a remote computer to access the weather data via web browser. Hardware Setup This project uses the EasyESP-1 board and the following hardware devices. BME280 sensor module: BME280 is a fully integrated environmental unit from Bosch that combines sensors for pressure,

EasyESP-1: A rapid prototyping and development board for ESP8266

Posted on January 9, 2017 by R-B 2 comments

EasyESP-1 is a rapid prototyping development board for the low-cost, WiFi-enabled ESP8266 microcontroller. With an onboard USB-to-Serial converter pre-installed, EasyESP-1 does not require any additional hardware to download your application firmware to the ESP8266 chip. The ESP module used in this development board is ESP-12E. All the I/O pins are broken out to 0.1” female headers for easy access, as well as to standard Grove connectors for connecting Grove sensors and other compatible modules. The 180-point breadboard further facilitates experimenting and testing of external circuits. You can buy EasyESP-1 from our Tindie Store. Non US buyers can also get it from

Serial seven segment LED display shield

Posted on December 6, 2016 by R-B 2 comments

Seven segment LED displays are brighter, more attractive, and provide a far viewing distance as well as a wider viewing angle compared to LCD displays. This project describes a serial seven segment LED display shield for Arduino Uno or compatible boards. The shield consists of eight 0.56″ seven segment displays that are driven by one MAX7219 chip. The shield also features a light dependent resistor (LDR) to implement adaptive brightness control to the LED displays. The LDR output can be fed to A0 or A1 analog input channel of Arduino to read the surrounding illumination level. Arduino can then use that

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