Arduino Starter Project: ESP8266

For the past month, I have been teaching myself about Arduino, ESP32 and ESP8266 boards, and additional sensors, such as neopixels, buttons and more. This has been a fun and challenging process, and I would recommend it to anyone with even the slightest interest in hardware engineering.

After learning the ins and outs of the technology for 4 weeks, I finally decided to tackle my first project. In this article, I will cover the details of the project.

A Little Background

ESP8266 boards are built by a company called Espressif Systems. The ESP8266 NodeMCU board includes WiFi, giving it high-powered capabilities to web scrape and interact with APIs. Additionally, the IDE I use for interacting with ESP boards is called Arduino. This is a simple-to-use yet robust platform that includes collections of sample code, a library manager, and one of the strongest developer communities I’ve come across.

Thanks to the magnitude of this community, it is likely that you can find the answers to any problems you run into. This, along with the built-in code examples, significantly lowers the barriers to getting started. Following this section, I will give a brief overview of my project and the components I used. Then, I will discuss my next steps and a link to the code.

The Project

I utilized a DHT11 sensor, photoresistor, and digital button in this project. Additionally, I worked with IFTTT (this = webhooks, that= Google Drive spreadsheet) to send new rows of data to google sheets. This has allowed me to collect data on my project, which I will use to perform some mathematical modeling. Here is a screenshot of the layout: