Using An Esp8266 And Cayenne As An IOT Sensor Monitor
TAGS: electronics; software; Esp8266; Arduino; WIFI Web Server; Cayenne
Why I Did This
I wanted to test a free IOT server service that allows me to monitor my microcontroller sensors from the web (from my smartphone). Cayenne (powered by myDevices) allows a user to add arduinos, esp devices, and raspberry pis to its server so you can monitor whatever sensors you attached to them from their website.
Cayenne's free IOT MQQT service.
Design Walkthrough
Parts: Esp8266 microcontroller; BME280 sensor;
After creating a free Cayenne account, website had simple enough directions to follow when setting a new microcontroller setup; there is an installable library package that has code examples you can modify. They basically consist of authentication keys (grabbed from your free Cayenne website account), and library’s class objects to interact with your sensor data. I added a BME280 (Temperature/ Humidity/ Pressure/ Altitude module) to the Esp8266, then sent those to the Cayenne server via “Cayenne.virtualWrite” commands.
Webpage display of sensor data.
Lessons Learned and Future Changes
It works ok, but has flaws. One of the intentions of this was to easily see the sensor data from my phone; it does this but there’s an issue with displaying all the data. It seems that either my phone or their website settings will block the view of some of my sensor data, making it impossible to view, and, as far as I could tell, they don’t have a smartphone app. Also, I was having issues trying to recall historical chart data from the website. Aside from those issues, it seems to work ok.References
Cayenne IOT service: https://developers.mydevices.com/cayenne/features/
BME 280 sensor: https://lastminuteengineers.com/bme280-arduino-tutorial/