Friday, April 1, 2022

Electronic Cricket Prank

Courtesy of my prankster daughter, I came downstairs to find Bot Thoughts labs "decorated" for April Fool's Day...

 

desk covered in balloons and streamers

Clearly, I had no choice but to exact revenge. To that end, I will be hiding an electronic cricket in her room to chirp at random, lengthy intervals. But where might one find an electric cricket on short notice? By repurposing a little device I built. Read on...

Monday, November 22, 2021

Make an ESP8266 WiFi Temperature Sensor & Python Flask Backend - Part 4

Last time, we combined our example sketches into a functioning temperature sensor and refactored the backend to receive temperature data. This time, let's get basic plotting working. To do that, we need to:

  • Save temperature data on the backend
  • Implement an API for getting that data
  • Write a client-side JavaScript app to plot the data with Chart.js

Here's our familiar diagram; we'll focus on the items marked with an orange star.

Let's start with saving temperature data... 

Friday, November 19, 2021

Make an ESP8266 WiFi Temperature Sensor & Python Flask Backend - Part 3

In the previous article, I created a rudimentary Flask backend to receive example data from our ESP8266. Here's a further decomposed system diagram to give you a better idea of where we're going. The orange stars indicate our focus for this article.

In a moment, I'll incorporate the HttpPostClient code into the temperature sensor example, send temperature data instead of example data, and refactor the backend API to receive temperature data. The GET API, index.html, and plot.js for plotting the data will be the focus in a future blog post.

So without further ado, I'll combine our example sketches into one...