Sometimes you get a piece of hardware and you don’t have any documentation about it. Or even worse, the documentation is just wrong. How can you reverse engineer pin allocations of such a device? Here are a couple of tricks on how you can that sensor or actuator to work.
Continue reading Reverse Engineering Pin Allocations
Do you know this situation: you are listening to a playlist from Spotify on your stereo but just can’t figure out who is singing that song? Since you are sitting comfortably on your couch (too far away from your stereo) you think how this problem could be solved with some clever engineering. You quickly draw up a mental design in your head: a ESP8266 based device connects over the net to Spotify. Then every few seconds it downloads information about the currently played song. Maybe some cover art too and display it on a color display! It can’t be THAT hard, right? This post explains the challenges I faced when implementing the ESP8266 Spotify remote and how I solved them.
Continue reading The ESP8266 Spotify Remote – Engineering Challenges
In the last few years all big IT companies have discovered the Internet-of-Things field in one way or the other. Apple and Google have offerings for home automation, Google, Amazon and Microsoft offer services to connect IoT devices to the cloud. For one of our projects we wanted to take a look at Microsofts Azure IoT Hub solution. Microsoft offers comprehensive libraries to connect the ESP8266 to the Azure cloud. But what about the ESP32? In this post we’ll describe how to create a shared access token for the Azure cloud. We’ll further cover how to use this token to send a minimalistic request with the ESP32 to the Azure IoT hub.
Continue reading How To Connect your ESP32 to the Azure IoT Cloud over REST
In the last post I showed you how you can use cheap hardware to get a reasonable good power consumption test rig. In this post we are going to use this tool to improve the runtime of the ESPaper significantly. The short trial and error cycle possible with this tool will let us validate several ideas for improvement in only very little time. Continue reading 5 Hacks to Prolong your ESPaper’s Battery Run-Time
In this post I’m going to show you how you can monitor the power consumption of your battery driven (ESP8266/ ESP32) device. Measuring the power consumption over a full activity/ sleep cycle is the precondition to optimize your code for a longer battery runtime. Only with a reliable tool you can decide which code changes lead to less consumption. In a later post we’ll look at some tweaks we can apply to the code to get a few more days out of the battery. Continue reading ESP8266: Monitoring Power Consumption
