ESP8266

Control Your Displays with the Arduino_GFX Library

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The Arduino_GFX library is a versatile option that works with a wide range of displays and Arduino-compatible boards.

Adding a display to your microcontroller project is a great way to show logged data, a device’s status, and much more. There are a lot of affordable displays on the market that connect to development boards, including those made by Arduino. Those displays most often connect through an SPI, I2C, or parallel data connection. But microcontrollers don’t have plug-and-play display drivers like a computer; you have to program the microcontroller with exactly what bits and bytes to send to the display to draw the desired pixels. That isn’t a trivial undertaking, but libraries can help. The Arduino_GFX library is a versatile option that works with a wide range of displays and Arduino-compatible boards.

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Aaron Christophel’s Open Source Tool Unprotects, Reads, and Flashes Any nRF52 From an ESP32

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Designed to unlock protected nRF52 SoCs, Christophel’s tool follows on from a similar exploit discovered for protected STM8 chips.

Developer Aaron Christophel has released a tool to read and write the internal flash of any part in the Nordic Semiconductor nRF52 family — using little more than a low-cost Espressif ESP32 microcontroller.

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Using Artnet DMX and the ESP32 to Drive Pixels

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I like to make things glow probably far more than a colorblind person should, and I’ve been looking for new and interesting ways to control the output of different lighting applications without having to hard-code in different color sequences. I’d like to be able to have some sort of complex visual, and then have that be able to play on the lights without having to think about which LED needs to be which color in a display.

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How to work with a Real Time Operating System and is it any good? (FreeRTOS, ESP32)

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Using a real operating system to simplify programming with the Arduino IDE. Is this possible and how? Let’s have a closer look!
Operating systems were invented to simplify our lives. But, because they need a lot of resources, they only run on reasonable computers like the Raspberry Pi or a PC. Right? Wrong. Nowadays, we also get operating systems running on our small MCUs. Particularly interesting in this respect is the ESP32 because it has enough power and memory to accommodate such an additional burden. And the best: It already runs a version of FreeRTOS with all our Arduino sketches, and it is easier than you think. Is this useful?

How to Configure an ESP Mesh Network using Arduino IDE – Communicate among and between ESP32, ESP8266, and NodeMCU

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Internet of Things (IoT) has seen exponential growth over the past couple of years. A new study from International Data Corporation (IDC) estimates that there will be almost 42 billion connected devices within the year 2025, generating over 80 zettabytes (ZB) of data. As the number of IoT devices grows; the amount of data grows, along with that, grows the need for superior network instruments; which can support this load.

However, if we consider a common host (like a generic router), it can connect to a limited number of nodes, less than 32 to be exact. And with an increasing number of IoT devices that could be in our home or industry, this is not sufficient. Currently, there are two solutions to this problem: The first one is to use a Mesh Router that can handle a lot more connections compared to a generic one, or we can use a network protocol known as Mesh Network.

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Controlling a ESP8266 with Alexa

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Here is an easy project using a Echo Dot (Alexa) to control my ESP8266. I give it simple commands (Alexa, lights, off) and the command shows on the LCD screen attached to the ESP8266. Actual relays will be the next step to attach.

The project is based on the Adafruit tutorial at https://learn.adafruit.com/easy-alexa-or-echo-control-of-your-esp8266-huzzah/overview

with LCD and other modifications made by me. My code is found at https://pastebin.com/NjMcsTRh

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