I recently got involved with an organization called Wearhacks.
WearHacks is an international non-profit organization headquartered in Montreal, focused on the promotion of innovation and entrepreneurship in Wearable Technology and Internet of Things all over the world.
They asked me to make a fun and seasonal project intended to be used at the Los Angeles Hacktoberfest event in order to introduce high schoolers to the world of IoT.
The result is – behold – the Hack-o-lantern.
I recently wrote a tutorial explaining how to make a connected barometer in which I used Thingspeak as an endpoint for the data. With the current buzz around the Internet of Things, a lot of similar services popped up : Plotly, the Wolframe data drop, Xively and even IBM Cloud to name a few.
What I find problematic with theses services is that you loose control over your data. What are they used for, what happens if the company closes ? You don’t want to lose your preciously collected data.
One solution is to create your own data platform. This way you keep full control over your database. You can set-up backups and are sure that your digital property wont be used for commercial purposes behind your back.
We will thus be making IoT.me, a web application using Node.js as a server, Express.js for the framework and MongoDB as the database (the MEAN stack, without the A).
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I’ve never really considered connecting my projects to WiFi since the price of the shields was so high. The HUZZAH from Adafruit will set you back $39.95. Sparkfun sells this shield for $84.95. Way to expensive.
So you might imagine my excitement when I first heard about the ESP8266 through hackaday. A WiFi module for less than $5, that sounded ideal. I started to read about it, checking out the projects that flourished around this newcomer. It seemed easy enough to use, and I was already imagining how I would start this article. Something like :
“Meet the great ESP8266, a low cost, plug&play device that will allow you to easily connect your projects to the web”.
But things did not go as planned…The first module I bought was defective, and it almost drove me nuts trying to figure out what was it that I was doing wrong. When I started to think about leaving electronics behind forever and starting a new life as a shepherd in South America, I decided that spending an additional five bucks for a new module just in case mine was broken from the start was not too much.
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