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First leap

A project log for Internet-of-Things Power Meter

Simple, cheap, easy to build and deploy, the IoT Power Meter provides accurate statistics on household power consumption.

solenoidSolenoid 07/26/2015 at 00:363 Comments

I've been developing this project for a while now to see how far I could take it, it seems it has huge potential. The ESP8266-12 is really a wonderful IoT chip and when coupled with an SD card reader, which is essentially an unlimited storage space, it can do awesome things.

I used the SDWebServer example to get started. It serves an .htm file from the SD card, which means the HTML and the code are completely separated, there are no more limitations to the size of the web page. This opens up a lot of interesting options. The example goes as far as to show how to view, upload and make/delete files and directories on the SD card... you can upload and download stuff via the tiny chip!!!

The SD card is formatted in FAT32 which means should anything happen to the device the contents of the card can be viewed with any computer, so if data is logged there it will never be lost.

Currently the ESP can connect to the WiFi network (in about 2 seconds) using the hardcoded credentials, show data and update the screen, do mDNS (so you do not need to know the IP of the device), serve web pages stored on the SD card and synchronise its internal time with an NTP server.

I think I'll be using this setup in my other projects from now on...

Discussions

vleiswal wrote 08/27/2015 at 13:07 point

Best of luck with the exams!

Looking forward to the completed project.

Regards

Vleis

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vleiswal wrote 08/26/2015 at 12:32 point

Great Job! Well done.

Will the complete project be available sometime?

Keep up the good work!

Regards

VleisWalker 

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Solenoid wrote 08/26/2015 at 12:39 point

Thanks. I will definitely complete the project and publish it, but I've been busy with my studies. As it happens I'll be done with them forever in 2 days :).

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