today i'm trying out monarchy english brown ale from little brown jug
they say this is a limited edition so i'm kind of happy i got to taste it while it existed
the tasting notes on the label claim malt flavors of toffee chocolate and dark fruits
with a toffee and toast aroma and medium body so today i'm going to be looking at this kit
that i got from banggood a while ago in this kit we have a lowland nodemcu uh esp8266 board
with one pin banding out to straighten that out a little bit this is sort of an older version of uh
esp8266 board there's nothing wrong with it but it's uh sort of predates the
d1 mini and that generation of boards which are much smaller but also break out a lot fewer pins
so that's probably why they included this in the kit because you can do a little bit more
with it if you choose to so we're gonna need that obviously there's two breadboards always
handy to have breadboards there's a bunch of breadboard jumper wires
um although i don't know if i'm going to use these particular ones just because
they're very long and they're going to get in in the way oh we'll see there is a
dht11 temperature and humidity sensor comes with its own female jumper wires
which i don't think i'm going to need for what i'm gonna do but those are good for if you just want
to go straight onto the pins there but i think i'm just going to plug it straight into the breadboard
uh what we got here is a usb cable that is almost three quarters of a meter they're about 700
millimeter something like that that's gonna come in handy we have the display board
it doesn't have pins with it i'm gonna have to solder my own pins on
oh and the peel no i'm not gonna put the music on this time i'm just gonna do a quick peel
so that can go on there now these ones i've already pulled out just to
see what they are and i've soldered the pins on them that is a gy30
which is a light intensity sensor not sure what that has to do with weather other than
until i guess you could tell you uh have your program decide if it's day or night
let's throw that guy onto the breadboard and the last one which also came with header pins
that i soldered on earlier just because is a bmp180 uh barometric pressure sensor
so there we go i'm gonna go find me some pins to solder onto that guy i'm sure most of you
have seen this trick before but when you're soldering header pins onto these modules it's
not a bad idea just plug it into a breadboard so everything stays nice and straight now i'll
just put away some of this extraneous crud and get this wired up onto the breadboard so we can play
with it also i'm gonna have to come up with some software that will take a little bit longer but uh
not for you because it will just be the blink of an edit oh yeah right i gotta straighten
that peanut don't i that often happens in shipping it's not the end of the world just
gotta be aware of it so you don't jam and damage anything all right i'll wire that up
and uh come back when i've got some code for you so here's the demonstration circuit that i've
come up with first of all these node mcu boards and a lot of the larger boards don't fit on one
breadboard fortunately they did include two in the kit so i was able to bridge across them like this
that gives me access to all the pins the other thing that i
the thing that i didn't use from the kit is i didn't use their wires just because
they're really long so i used some jumper wires from my own
supply just to make it a little bit neater for this other than that it's everything from the kit
so we have the display over here connected to i squared c that's sda and scl pins then we have the
bmp 180 barometric pressure sensor also connected to sda and scl next to it we have the gy30
light sensor also connected to sdn scl each one of those three has a different address that's
how come they can all be connected in parallel to the same control pins and then way back here
we have the dht11 temperature and humidity sensor that one talks over its own protocol
and it just gets power ground and one pin that being that one there and i've got it connected
i've just picked arbitrarily it's physically d4 here but you see later in software the
physical pins and the arduino labeling of the pins is different which can cause
some confusion when you're working with these boards so just watch out for and be aware of it
and that's basically it and then power to everything all these modules will run on 3.3 volts
some of them require it i think that display board uh if it doesn't get 3.3
volts there's some software trickery you can use to make it generated internally
but the esp8266 requires 3.3 volts maximum so the 5 volts coming in from the usb goes through this
regulator here to generate 3.3 volts that powers the rest of the circuit but that was the easy
part the hard part at least for me was coming up with software because banggood didn't supply
any and i couldn't find any written for this specific kit so i pulled together some demos and
which are basically the demo sketches for each of these modules and i put something together
here so there you can see through the shutter scroll that it is displaying all the parameters
and i'm just refreshing the screen every five seconds in software
so right now it's showing temperature and humidity off the dht11
it's not quite that humid in my basement right now but it is fairly humid my dehumidifier
says it's about 51 right now and i've had to shut it off while i'm recording the video because it's
noisy um the barometric pressure and what is coming off the bmp80 and the light level is
coming off that gy30 so if i hold my hand over the light sensor and wait for it to refresh
see it gets much darker and if i just mechanically squeeze the pressure sensor you see it changed and
when i lift off it should go back to where it was more or less i suppose i could lean in there and
warm up the temperature sensor but you get the idea that is about the temperature that
it is on my workbench so that's one of the pieces of software the other one
doesn't use the screen and just and uses the wi-fi capabilities the esp8266 and i will
probably demonstrate that best at the computer so to load these sketches onto this nodemcu board i
just had to choose the correct board and i found generic esp8266 module worked just fine on this
so i'm going to upload the second sketch that i came up with the wi-fi one i'm going to make
both of these available for download they're not stunning examples of programming skill because
i'm not a stunning example of a programmer but they will be both available it's not going to look
quite the same i'm going to clean it up afterwards but once it's uploaded we'll just go over here
to the serial window and it'll show us that it's connected to my
experimental workshop wi-fi and it has started so we'll click on that
and there it is your basic weather station showing that it's 23 degrees 56 percent humidity
there's the pressure there's the light and when i cover up the light sensor and refresh
the page it should show as darker there it is refresh the page that's the basics of it
now the boring part that i'll try and make interesting going through the hacky code
that i put together so here's the one that uses the display on on the board
it's just standard arduino code that as i said i stripped most of this out of the library
demos for the various libraries that power the different modules so spi and wire and adafruit
fruit graphics and that uh it fruit sd 1306 for the display the dht11 bmp yeah it's
that's all just straightforward includes and if you're going to use this just make
sure you've got those libraries installed on your system using the usual methods
and then defines and again these are all stripped straight out of the demo sketches
that come with the libraries i've just separated them all out for easy finding
setup define stuff blah blah begin the different libraries and then the loop
simply enough we read the sensors read everything out of them that we need
and then we print them on the uh on the little tft module um set the cursor to different lines
uh and positions print out the information carry on to the next one bang bang bang wait for five
seconds then refresh the screen and carry on it's as simple as that and here's the almost identical
stuff for the wi-fi version basically i just added in wi-fi stuff and stripped out the the
display stuff because i figured if you're going to be running this thing on wi-fi you're probably not
going to want the local display on it you could glue them together if you want i'm not stopping
you what the various library includes again just got to make sure that they're all installed
and the include for the weather the web server stuff uh just the standard esp8266 wi-fi library
uh oh yeah i forgot to mention this earlier so even though the dht11 is connected to physical pin
4 on the board logically in arduino software it refers to it as digital pin 2 so we just defined
that there and the other library hit exactly the same thing and then setting up the web server of
course put your own ssid and your own password in there i'm not about to show you mine create
the web server instance and then all this is the same that's for the various different sensors
and here is more web server stuff just start starting up the serial monitor so you can
find out what you're connected to and what the ip address is because that's important
you could also in the library example you can set it up with a static ip address
but you just need to know what's available on your network if you're going to do that
and then the loop is the same until we get back down to the web server stuff where it creates
the basics of a web page and there might actually be some extra crap in there that i forgot to pull
out but it's not strictly necessary um there is some the demo that i pulled this out of had push
buttons and window decorations and stuff like that which i don't need for what i'm doing if
you're uh wanting a fancy web page feel free but anyway it just prints out the uh the name the
labels and the variables super simple even a hack like me can understand it so this
i think would be not a bad kit for somebody starting to get into the hardware side
of uh of microcontrollers and arduino if you're coming from the software side since
it doesn't come with any of its own software and you've got to come up with it on your own
it's not a bad little assortment of parts just to have as parts if you want to expand your
your collection slash accumulation of arduino related things you could build it up into a
onto a perf board or a circuit board to make it more permanent if you wanted to without the
breadboards and jumper wires and stuff you could park you know that side of it in a
ventilated box someplace and just wi-fi to it to uh get temperature and sensor information
lots of things you could do with it i think it's kind of neat and for what was it 20-ish dollars
not uh not a horrible value i think i'm going to be absorbing these modules and everything else
into my general inventory rather than keeping it together as a weather station kit
but for what it is it's good for experimenting with the environmental sensors here is this kit
uh i got it from banggood oh it's currently on sale uh i'll have a link down below and
i used to have a big good discount code for this thing if i can find it if it's still valid i'll
put it down in the description regardless i'll put a link to this down there anyway
there is a link down here to a manual which isn't very useful it tells you how to connect it up
using software that it doesn't provide to connect to several web-based platforms
i couldn't find this documentation and again neither could the person that i talked to it
uh at banggood i hope you found that interesting uh hope somebody finds my code
useful if not amusing or horrifying um let me know what you think down in the comments section
like i said i will have a link to this kit and to the hacky code that i wrote down in in the
description so if you want to take a look feel free uh thanks for watching i'll talk to you later