We all would like a smart home that intelligently notifies us when there are problems. Learning how to make IoT devices can give you the tools to build and control your home to be as smart as you want it to be.

Background

I would like to start off this blog by creating a low powered IoT device that we can start with. From there, we can look at the data that the IoT device is sending and what conclusions we can draw from the data. Andreas Spiess’s youtube video on using Node-Red, InfluxDB, and Grafana inspired me to peruse it for the ESP32.

Rough list of future posts to come:

• Background + Supplies (This post)
• Setting up tools
• Programming “hello world”
• Collect some measurements and Gitlab Continuous Integration
• Captive Wifi Portal for easy credential handling
• Setting up cloud to post measurements to
• Verifying Cloud Connections
• Final – Verifying everything with live data – from sensor to data visualization
• (potential future)Adding an BME280 temperature and humidity sensor
• (potential future)Device Sleeping – Why I chose EzSBC based ESP32 boards
• (potential future)Using Python to draw conclusions from the data

End Objective

I have already built a system for monitoring water leaks (and humidity/temperature) and I will be showing you how to make one:

This project is manageable once you break down this project into small pieces, and I think it will give us a good starting point for learning new IoT and software ideas.

Supplies

For this project I will use the following tools:

• Visual Studio Code
• Platform IO
• ESP32 Development Board (ESP32-01 or ESP32_BAT)
• Docker host or VM capable of running docker and docker-compose
• (potential future) I2C sensors (BME280)