In the previous posts, I described a simple weather station that measures temperature and humidity and sends the measurements to a Google sheet. The system is supposed to be used at home. Therefore, one of the next possible improvements can be measuring air quality in a room. That can be done, for example, by adding an MH-Z19B sensor for measuring CO2 level. We’ll use again a ESP32 board and MicroPython.
In one of the previous posts I briefly described sending data to Google Sheets from a ESP32 board using MicroPython. As I mentioned earlier, the code is available on GitHub. Here are the main features:
The Google Sheet doesn’t need to be publicly available on the Internet. The device doesn’t require any middleman such as PushingBox or IFTTT.
In this post, let’s focus a bit on technical details.
On a wonderful weekend in summer time, instead of going out to a beach or somewhere else, I was staying at home and wondering if it’s possible to send data from an ESP board to a Google sheet using my favorite MicroPython. Let’s say it can send temperature and humidity measured by a DHT22 sensor. That’s how the project started.
(this post contains a brief description of the project, more technical details can be found in the next post)
When you play with new microcontroller, first thing you usually do is driving an LED. That’s a classic “Hello World!” project for microcontrollers. That’s what I did when I was playing first time with ESP8266 and MicroPython. Let’s move on, and implement another classic project – measuring temperature and humidity with DHT22 sensor. But we don’t want to be quiet, so we are going to share this so important data on the Internet. ThingSpeak will help us with it. Let’s add a new warrior to the army of Internet of Shit!
In my previous post about running MicroPython on ESP8266, I mentioned that ESP8266 boards may have different amount of flash. Similarly there are two versions of MicroPython: limited version for 512K, and full version for boards which have more than 512K of flash. In that post, I played with ESP-07 which had only 512K, so I had to use a limited version of MicroPython. This limited MicroPython version was enough just to turn on/off an LED, but it turned out that it actually doesn’t work well.
I like the idea of Internet of Things (IoT) which is becoming so popular. We have everything connected to the Internet: TVs, printers, fridges, cars, even teeth brushes, etc. We already have botnets which consist of IoT devices, and are used for massive DDoS attacks. I personally prefer calling it “Internet of Shit” because sometimes it’s not clear why some devices connect to the Internet. By the way, there is a twitter called “Internet of Shit”. I highly recommend to follow.
Using those fancy IoT devices is fun. Furthermore, sometimes such devices are even helpful. But it’s more fun to participate more actively. For example, you can create your own IoT device with blackjack and hookers. God bless those people who developed ESP8266 boards which now allow everybody to build their own IoT devices. As you may know, ESP8266 boards are extremely cheap. And I would say they are relatively easy to use (especially if you know about Google).
I was going to try ESP8266 controllers for long time. Finally, I did it, and want to share my experience in hope it may be useful. I found a lot of articles about ESP8266 and NodeMCU firmware which allows you to run Lua scripts on your ESP8266 board. That’s cool, but the problem is that I don’t know anything about Lua language. Another problem is that I am lazy in this time of year, so I didn’t want to learn Lua. But luckily I know Python a little bit, and there is MicroPython project which allows you to run Python scripts on embedded devices including ESP8266.
Here is a tutorial how to get started with ESP8266 and MicroPython.
Русская версия – Как запустить MicroPython на ESP8266
