Having fun with the ESP32

A few weeks ago, I came across the MQTT protocol and how one can use it within the world of Internet Of Things (IOT). For those not familiar with the protocol, it’s a lightweight protocol where a publisher, say the sensor, send a short message to a server. The subscriber then can receive that message and act on it if needed. That’s just what I needed since I want my clock(s) to be able to show internal and external temperatures and maybe even more like unread emails. So today I installed a local server and started to play around with it. I will order some extra ESP32’s to first play around with it since the one I have is hard wired to the display and I do not want to use it without the display component which makes sure it’s turned off in the beginning. Next to that I can use an extra one to make my toilet connected to the internet as well. My toilet? Yes, my toilet has a ceiling with 120 WS2811 led’s in it showing different patterns once you get in. Next to that there is a distan...

Last year I bought a 64x16 red led matrix. Not a clue what to do with it but it was fun to play around with. It took me a few minutes to get is connected to my Arduino Uno and installing an example. That was easy, but what should I build? It took some time and a lot more tweaking to get the display to dim and show a nice 16 dots character font which I found was useable. The diming was a nice feature since the idea of making a clock for the living room was born, but I do not need another “red” light source. Adding a LDR determining the minimum value and I had an automatically dimming display which could show the time when provided by the USB interface.  Since the internal clock is not really precise I started with adding a real-time clock with a back-up battery, but even that did not satisfy my wishes. That where I came along the ESP8266. A cool, tiny in size but big in power, little controller with WiFi build in. At first, I started playing around with the AT interface which i...