We all know that the IOT phenomenon is on a full swing nowadays. The rapid development of new and low cost devices has fuelled this phenomenon.
A year( or two) ago, i came across a new board, The Raspberry Pi – This is a cheap full blown computer with USB ports, ethernet ports, HDMI and GPIO ports. The best part is GPIO ports which lets you directly interact with hardware.It also lets you install many flavours of linux on it and has a 1Ghz CPU , and a dedicated GPU, which makes it much more powerful then regular Arduino boards.
I did a lot of fun projects with the Raspberry Pi – some of which were software only and some hardware based. The ones i remember are :
- A Auto downloading web based torrent client using transmission- can be accessed from anywhere
- XBMC ( Now called Kodi ) : As a media library for my newly purchased TV
- Ambilight Clone with Ws2801 LED Strip and Raspberry pi
- Location based AC Switch with a IR led and Raspberry pi
But as i thought more about automating my home, the cost of raspberry pi became a big factor and my interest slowly ebbed.
Until recently( a month ago ) when a friend told me about a marvellous new board – The ESP8266, A tiny board which contains a powerful wireless radio, with full TCP Stack and a integrated microcontroller and Almost 19 GPIO pins for a mere Rs150-250.
This sparked my interest. I have spent last 3 weeks ordering, playing and doing awesome stuff with the ESP8266. I have also started re-learning electronics from the ground up. I have re-built my electronics lab ( so to speak ) .
The coming posts on this blog will cover my experiments with the ESP8266, Ardunio , General Electronics and Software( which is my bread and butter ). I am writing a blog for the first time, so please bear with me and feel free to suggest/point out any mistakes/suggestions.
Time to Rock 🙂