I've been having some fun recently with a pretty simple board. I mentioned it last week on this thread. It is really inspired by @cubeberg who has done a lot more work with bridging nRF24 communications back to the cloud then I have. He's using CC3200 but I wanted to try continue some work that I have been doing with ESP8266 and MQTT. Both technologies are freakishly cool!
The basic premise is that sensor nodes are powered by a single AAA battery, then I use a TPS61097A-33DBVT to boost the voltage to 3.3V. From there I power up a MSP430G2553 running some code that I wrote in Energia. The code basically reads a Si7020 temp/humidity sensor via I2C and dumps the readings to nRF24 using the @spirilis library. On the other side, there is another one of these nodes in RX mode waiting for the nRF24 packets to come in and forwards them on to ESP8266 via UART.
What is new, is that I'm working on some ESP8266 code that takes incoming UART data and forwards it on to a MQTT broker running at analog.io. Then I have new web features to connect to this virtual terminal right inside of a browser. Embeds work too:
[analog_io='d1']
So what you see is live data coming across this system. If you type things into the terminal, it is transmitted live to the ESP8266 UART and subsequently the MSP430. I have not coded up any actions to take from the received messages yet but it would be fun to hear suggestions if anyone has them!
I haven't exposed this functionality to users yet but am curious if anyone wants to give it a try and help me work out the kinks (which I'm sure that there are many). Ultimately I think that I would like to make a product that is a super simple to use WiFi UART that could be added to any project, then users can decide how they want to use it.
Some pictures:
