Time to try something different – this week, the JeeLabs blog and articles will be written by Thorsten von Eicken, as guest author. I’m very excited by the project he has created and will gladly step aside to let him introduce it all -jcw
Has it ever happened to you that you put together a nice JeeNode or Arduino project, test it all out on your bench, then mount it “in the field” and … it doesn’t quite work right? Or the next day it malfunctions? Well, to me it happens all the time. Or I want to add another feature to my greenhouse controller or my weather station but I don’t want to bring it back to my bench for a few days for a full rework and re-test. Instead I’d love to troubleshoot or tune the code remotely, sitting comfortably at home in the evening while my project is mounted somewhere out there.
My first attempt at solving this situation was to deploy a BeagleBone Black with a WiFi dongle and a serial cable (a RaspberryPi or Odroid could work just as well):
Essentially I turned a $55 BBB plus a little $10 WiFi dongle into a remote FTDI widget. In the first moment I was in heaven: it’s an inexpensive solution in the grand scheme of things and it worked great. But then I became addicted and one BBB was insufficient: I wanted to hook more than one remote JeeNode up! Well, suddenly the prospect of buying 3-4 such set-ups didn’t look so inexpensive anymore!
That’s when the esp8266 WiFi modules caught my eye at a cost under $5. Here is a WiFi module with a processor and a UART and, most importantly, an SDK (software development kit). The SDK suggested that I could implement the key functions to remotely watch debug output of a JeeNode as well as reprogram it, just like I was doing with the BBB. My mind started racing: what could I make it do? What would a complete hardware solution cost? How much power would it use? What is its WiFi range?
At that point I chatted with JC about my little project, which I called “esp-bridge”, and got a cautiously interested response with ingredients ranging from “sounds very cool!” to “it’s gonna use way too much power”. Not to be easily deterred I thought it would take me about a week to write some code. That was 4 months ago, and while I have a day job I have spent a lot of time on the esp-bridge project since. In the end, I hope you will benefit from all this because through this week’s episode of the JeeLabs blog you will indeed be able to complete the journey in one week! The plan for the week is as follows:
- Meet the esp8266– Wed
- The esp-bridge circuit– Thu
- Serial bridge– Fri
- Web server software– Sat
- Over-The-Air update– Sun
- Putting it all together– Mon
As the week develops (and beyond) I would love to hear your feedback and questions. The last post will be written just-in-time so I can try to answer anything that comes up before then. For general discussion, please use the esp-link thread on the ESP8266.com site or open a new thread in the same forum. If you download the software from GitHub to put your own esp-bridge together and run into bugs or mis-features please post to the GitHub issues tracker.
Quick clarifications about names: esp-bridge refers to the hardware & software gadget described in this blog series while esp-link is the name of the software itself.
(For comments, visit the forum area)