Another eclectic electric collection for your delectation.
- First, Pete Scargill has posted info on a new development PCB for the ESP12 series. The boards are actually designed by Aidan Ruff and he obviously puts a lot of work into getting them not just “right”, but user-friendly, too. Take a look at the unambiguous component and value silkscreening (just try doing that on your next project and see how long it takes you!).
- Horacio Bouzas has added a GPS unit to the serial port of an ESP8266, sending GPS data via JSON. Not too many details there yet, but Horacio does have several other ESP projects on his blog.
- Amir Avni (on the other hand) has put together a very detailed post on his project to log the temperature of the hot water produced by his roof-top solar panel.
- Theo Arends has been busy with his Sonoff-MQTT-OTA-Arduino project (referred to elsewhere in these pages as “TASMOTA“) and has added syslog, additional status commands, a new “button topic” and also a fix to re-enable manual (button) operation if the MQTT broker happens to be down.
One of Theo’s more recent updates is to add a couple of photos to the README.md for the Sonoff-MQTT-OTA-Arduino project (scroll down to the bottom of the page) of a (broken) Kaku 433Mhz mains switch which he has gutted and replaced with an ESP8266 to make a Sonoff look-alike. I can’t find any further details of the project, but from what we can see from the photograph (click to enlarge) and what we already know of the Sonoff, it should be relatively easy to duplicate this if you have any of these older Kaku units gathering dust.