More ESP8266 fun

I continue to test and validate the stability of Node Red, MQTT (on Rasp Pi Zero) and SONOFF devices with various firmware loads as a home automation platform.

This past weekend at the TRW Swap Meet I picked up a LoLin V3 NodeMcu Lua CH340G ESP8266 development board for $8 from Tim who is there nearly every month and has many cool Arduino and other micro-controller items. This board is cool because it is a ESP8266, has a built in FTDI USB interface all in a nice break-out board. After doing some quick googling I found many resources to get going with this board. The following are my steps:

1.) Download serial driver for LoLin Board -->  HERE
2.) Configure/check-out the board using the Arduino IDE (I'm using v1.8.1) from this site --> HERE
3.) WebServer to control LED from this site --> HERE
4.) MQTT DHT code  -->  HERE , I then modified it for JSON message format HERE

With step 4, we have our own Arduino IDE based MQTT code running on the ESP8266

I created a Node Red flow HERE to monitor the DHT sensors to chart the message that are sent every minute.

I was able to build this Node Red dashboard.

I am now running ESPurna v1.13.0 firmware on one of my SONOFF basics and so far I believe it is simpler than Tasmota for setup and operation. I am now running it to see how it looks as far as uptime and hangs. I was getting restarts of Tasmota every day or so and recently hard hangs that required me to reset them and reconfigure it back on the network.