Which Arduino do you Own ?

It's a project I'll probably never finish

Got to have lots of them ... wouldn;t want to have nothing to do as I sit in my rocking chair in the old peoples home ...

>So that I can sense temperatures remotely from a number of places

For that you can pretty much just copy exactly what I did for my last project: Remote (Water) Temperature Monitoring

I have all that in github under MIT licence, so you can freely use it for anything including commercial purposes.

And you can use the Wemos or Witty directly in place of the ESP-01, skipping all that extra mess of hardware work.

It's also near the top of my wishlist, so I hope to soon expand those last few details to better support multiple graphs. At the least I want an inside/outside temperature setup for multiple hummingbird feeders, as well as for my trailer = 3 ESP boards, each with 2 DS18B20 temperature sensors.

I can even throw a set of scripts into a server folder for you to play with. Super quick and easy to do and costs nothing.

-Nico

Thanks Nico; that's very very helpful.

I'll go ahead and order up a couple of Wittys. I'm also interested in remote temperature sensing and keen to experiment with ESP-NOW as mentioned in Frank Milburn's Blog:

https://www.element14.com/community/community/project14/open-arduino/blog/2018/04/17/l-s-cubed-little-sister-security-system

So that I can sense temperatures remotely from a number of places - It's a project I'll probably never finish but I'd like to give it a go.

Neil

>mine just says "what have you brought now" with those rolling eyes and scow that only a married man can appreciate ....

LOL yep. I know the look. Every time I get little packages in the mail.

Mine has started following my example now - she's started buying all sorts of things on eBay now just to keep up

It's that "if you can't beat em, join em" approach, I think.

-Nico

Oh! one more edit about the Witty I just remembered: that stacked board configuration also means (looking ahead) we could create a custom PCB for a project and then simply plug the Witty onto it, and unplug it for reprogramming on the base.

or when talking with our spouses, "blame"

Time to stand up for yourself ....

mine just says "what have you brought now" with those rolling eyes and scow that only a married man can appreciate ....

>Yes I agree there were issues, and I'm not sure all of the blame was mine, but it could be.

Pioneering is hard. Given that you're not exactly a novice at this game I would suspect that Mongoose OS needs a bit more work... even if that work is just in the form of tutorials.

I can't recall who first recommended the Witty to me, but I'd like to give them the kudos for that (or when talking with our spouses, "blame" )

Mongoose OS don't fill me with a great deal of confidence!

It was brought to my attention that Mongoose OS was now able to do the ESP series of boards ... and I had to try it.

Yes I agree there were issues, and I'm not sure all of the blame was mine, but it could be.

I haven't even tried the Arduino IDE ...yet.

I do like ntewinkel choice of the Witty. I found the others were just too limiting and someone demonstrated the ESP32.

Guess who will be shopping later

Mark

>Any suggestions for the first one to experiment with?

I've been programming mine straight from the Arduino IDE, so my advice is biased towards that. I know there are other ways to program them (Lua, I think?), so my specific reasons might not apply to that case.

I would recommend either the Witty or the Wemos.

Both are priced similarly around $4 US (I think the Wemos is a little bit less).

They both have the nice and easy micro-usb connection so you can just plug it in and program it via the Arduino IDE.

They both break out a nice set of easy to access GPIO pins.

And they are quite small.

The Witty has a neat design of using a base board that the main board plugs into, for (I think) the sole purpose of programming it. Unplugging it from that base still allows powering it via micro-usb through a port directly on the main board.

Plus the Witty has a fun RGB led and a light sensor, which makes for very easy starting as you don't even need to add hardware - for my remote temperature monitor, for example, I could have done all of my software building and testing just using that light sensor.

I found the ESP-01 too much effort as a starting point because it doesn't have the easy plug-in-and-go micro-usb like other boards, and it only really has 1 easy to get to GPIO, 2 with a little bit more effort. It's tiny and only about $2 though, so it does have its use when deploying multiple remote sensors. It was a fun challenge though

The Adafruit Huzzah doesn't have the micro-usb either, but appears to be programmable via a standard usb-serial row of pins (I haven't tried mine yet).

I've also bought a Sonoff to play with, but it's similar to the ESP-01 in that it becomes more complicated to program and set up independently. It does add a case and a relay though. It's around $7.

So I recommend the Witty.  (edit: ps, the Witty also comes fully pre-assembled so you don't even need to solder on any headers!)

The nice thing is that all of these units are very affordable so it's easy to try a few.

edit: picture halfway down the page compares a few of them: Remote (Water) Temperature Monitoring (size of Witty is only about 1 1/4" square and 3/4" high, so still very compact)

Hope that helps!

-Nico

Thanks Mark

Your experiences with the ESP32 but more specifically the Mongoose OS don't fill me with a great deal of confidence!

The ESP8266, in all it's different board offerings looks much closer to my capabilities, especially the use of the Arduino IDE!

Neil