Table Of ContentESP8266 Home Automation
Projects
Leverage the power of this tiny WiFi chip to build exciting
smart home projects
Catalin Batrinu
BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI
ESP8266 Home Automation Projects
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First published: November 2017
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ISBN 978-1-78728-262-9
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Credits
Author Project Coordinator
Catalin Batrinu Kinjal Bari
Reviewer Proofreader
Constantin Tambrea Safis Editing
Acquisition Editor Indexer
Prachi Bisht Francy Puthiry
Content Development Editor Graphics
Eisha Dsouza Tania Dutta
Technical Editor Production Coordinator
Naveenkumar Jain Melwyn Dsa
Copy Editor
Safis Editing
About the Author
Catalin Batrinu graduated from the Politehnica University of Bucharest in Electronics,
Telecommunications, and Information Technology. He has been working as a software
developer in telecommunications for the past 16 years. He has worked with old protocols
and the latest network protocols and technologies, so he has experienced all the recent
transformations in the telecommunications industry. He has implemented many
telecommunications protocols, from access adaptations and backbone switches to high-
capacity, carrier-grade switches on various hardware platforms from Wintegra and
Broadcom.
The Internet of Things came as a natural evolution for him and now he collaborates with
different companies to construct the world of tomorrow, which will make our life more
comfortable and secure. Using the ESP8266, he has prototyped devices such as irrigation
controllers, smart sockets, window shutters, digital addressable lighting controls, and
environment controls, all of them controlled directly from a mobile application via the
cloud. An MQTT broker with bridging and a WebSockets server was even developed for
the ESP8266. Soon, these devices will be part of our daily lives, so we will all enjoy their
functionality.
Don't forget to then keep an eye on his blog https://myesp8266.blogspot.com and on
the new platform as a service that you will discover soon at https://iotcentral.eu.
About the Reviewer
Constantin Tambrea has been a senior software engineer at Luxoft Romania for more than
9 years, and has been involved in various projects in the telecommunications field. He
holds master's and bachelor's degrees in Computer Science from University Politehnica in
Bucharest. His main domains of interest are Java Enterprise applications and web
development techniques, but recently he has become passionate about the Internet of
Things domain, in which he is experimenting with a personal home automation project.
I would like to give thanks to Catalin Batrinu, my colleague, and friend, for introducing me to the
IoT world and for encouraging me to review his work on this book.
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Table of Contents
Preface 1
Chapter 1: Getting Started with the ESP8266 7
Starting with the ESP8266 chip 8
Installing Arduino IDE 9
Downloading the Arduino Software IDE 9
Configure Arduino IDE 11
Installing the ESP8266 SDK 13
How to install a library 17
Libraries from the Arduino's repository 18
Library is not in the repository 19
It is time for your first program 20
Seeing the result 22
Connecting ESP8266 to Wi-Fi 24
Getting data from the internet 26
Sending data to the internet 35
Summary 41
Chapter 2: Building and Configuring Your Own MQTT Server 42
Message Queue Telemetry Transport 42
Quality of service 43
Security 43
Retain messages and last will 44
Basic terminology 44
Wildcards on topics 46
Introducing Mosquitto broker 47
ESP8266 and MQTT 51
Publishing data from the ESP8266 53
Receiving MQTT messages in the ESP8266 56
Securing Mosquitto 59
Summary 64
Chapter 3: Building a Home Thermostat with the ESP8266 65
SPIFFS 65
SPIFFS objects 67
Directory object 69
File object 70
Temperature sensor 73
Summary 85
