Recent Updates (March 1st, 2019)

Otto Winter has been continuing his updates to esphome with improvements to the set-up wizard and the addition of min/max settings for rotary encoders (esphome enables you to add an ESP8266 or ESP32 to Home Assistant without writing any code).

Theo Arends has been working on reducing stack space usage in Sonoff-TASMOTA to fix some intermittent crashes.  If you’re having issues, please upgrade to version 6.4.1.18 or greater (see this post for more details).

Phil Bowles has been updating the API documentation and examples for his esparto rapid development framework for the ESP8266 (available as an Arduino IDE library; write concise, working code with no setup() or loop() functions).

Xose Pérez has made lots of changes to his espurna replacement firmware for ESP8266 devices over the past few weeks, with support for more than twenty new products added and the incorporation of many fixes (both from Xose himself and submitted by an ever-growing community of users).

Rich Heslip has published an ESP32 project, “Motivation Radio BLEMIDI”, to add WiFi and Bluetooth functionality to Eurorack based modular synthesizers.  The hardware for this module is also open source and available from a separate repository, courtesy of Jim Matheson.

 

Recent Updates (Feb 14th 2019)

I’ve added Mike Rankin’s Twitter feed to the ESP32 links section (RH column).  Mike has several ESP8266 and ESP32 projects in his Github repository and usually has some interesting commentary on his Twitter feed (ongoing status, problems, fixes, etc).  His latest project, a rechargeable-coin-cell based ESP32 mini board, is definitely worth a look, as are his previous ESP8266 creations.

Theo and his merry band of helpers have been hard at work pushing out more updates to Sonoff-TASMOTA.  Along with some code refactoring at the end of January to change “boolean” types to “bool” and “byte” to “uint8_t”, some other interesting updates have just slipped out in the last couple of recent releases:-

• Templates.  This is a great new feature which allows people to  add new device GPIO definitions via JSON templates.  A repository for user-submitted templates has already been created.
• Support for multiple ADS1115 devices on the i2c bus.  If you’ve been limited by the single AtoD pin on the ESP8266, you can now add up to four, four-channel ADS1115 devices (on unique addresses) to the i2c bus and have them automatically recognized.
• Numeric operators “==”,  “!=” ,  “>=”  and  “<=”  added to rules (the previously existing  “=”  string comparator frequently produced unexpected results when used in a numeric context).
• HASS discovery and status for sensors.

Martin Ger has just updated his esp_wifi_repeater package to handle MQTT QOS (in version 2.2.5).

Adding Alexa control.  Phil Bowles has released a tiny Wemo emulator library, “weenymo“.  It’s about 60 lines of code and adds Alexa on/off functionality to your ESP8266 projects (and don’t forget to check out his “esparto” rapid development library while you’re visiting his GitHub repository).

Otto Winter has integrated the esphomeyaml and esphomelib projects under the umbrella name of “esphome“.  If you haven’t come across either (any) of these before, the basic idea is that a user can write a short configuration file and have code automatically generated for an ESP8266 or ESP32.  With esphome, you can have an application up and running on your ESP in a few minutes without writing a single line of code yourself.

Recent Updates

JLed – a library to provide painless control of LED blinking, breathing and fading effects.

Jan Delgado has updated his JLed library a couple of times over the past week.  The first update was a change specific to the ESP8266 to improve the 8-bit to 10-bit scaling, so that LEDs now reach full brightness.  The second change is the addition of a boolean return value to the Update() function to indicate whether the target effect is still active, or has completed.

OpenMQTTGateway – Bidirectional gateway for the integration of 433MHz, BLE and IR devices with MQTT.

Florian has made a small change to his OpenMQTTGateway to make the “TRACE” function compile-time selectable, in order to reduce the overall code size for those who don’t use it.

IRremoteESP8266 – A library to enable IR send and receive on the ESP8266.

Mark and his various contributors (including “crankyoldgit”) have added initial support for Elektra, Samsung and Whirlpool air-conditioners and experimental support for  Coolix and Lutron.  There are also additional fixes for Mitsubishi A/C and the IRMQTTServer code.

Esparto – A rapid development framework for ESP8266

Phil Bowles has added MQTT username & password functionality to his (relatively new) rev-2 version of Esparto, as well as fixing a couple of minor bugs.

 

esp8266-weather-station-color – An ESP8266 and ILI9341/XPT2046 based weather display.

Daniel and Marcel continue to update the colour weather-station display, with fixes for some I18N and WiFi issues.