Welcome to the IoT Workshop based on ESP8266, a DHT11/22 and NeoPixel RGB LED.

This material is designed to guide you in your B31TF Sensors, Actuators & IoT individual assignment.

The material in this workshop is based on the IBM workshop at this link (no longer being mantained): https://binnes.github.io/esp8266Workshop/

You will learn how to connect an ESP8266 to a Cloud IoT platform over MQTT and stream environmental data from the sensors to a Jupyter notebook.

This document is designed to guide your learning esperience and help you to develop your system, gradually. Make sure you understand each step and that each step works correctly, before moving to the next step.

The document provides information on what you should achieve at the end of each part, and lab sessions to let you familiarise with some of the hardware and software tools you will be using. It also provides hints and links to useful resources and to some of the code you need to use, but does not give you a fully working solution. You will need time to research practical ways to achieve your objectives, and learn about ESP8266 programming, MQTT and IoT Platforms.

In addition to a MQTT broker, your application will use a number of services, such as Node-RED, to visualise sensor data and to control your device, and Jupyter, to carry out some simple data analytics.

The original version of this workshop was based on IBM IoT and IBM Watson, but those platforms have been updated. In addition, while they provide a free-tier access, they require credit card details for the registration.

IMPORTANT

We have provided here some suggestions on free-to-use MQTT brokers and Cloud platforms you can use to connect and test the different parts of your applications.

Alternatively, you may find other suitable MQTT brokers or IoT Cloud platforms providing their own MQTT broker as well as additional services, all-in-one, which may be convenient as you would not need to setup multiple accounts and use different dashboards for different services, e.g. see here and other links provided on Canvas.

The source for this workshop is hosted on GitHub and this site is automatically generated from the Markdown in the GitHub repository.

The assignment is split into 4 parts.

To start the workshop navigate to the Part 1 Introduction.

Make sure you have all the prerequisite software installed, before you start.

Provides an overview to the assignment, introduces the hardware, the development tooling and then gets you programming the ESP8266 device to connect to the local WiFi network and be able to control the hardware.

The second part of the assignment requires you to look at how you can connect a device to the Cloud using the MQTT protocol.

Optional: You could investigate how to ensure a secure connection between the device and your cloud platform, using SSL/TLS security and certificates.

In this section we look at using a low-code cloud-based development environment called Node-RED to implement the server side part of the IoT solution.

You will need to create a dashboard to visualise the IoT data and also provide controls to configure the ESP8266 device.

Your server side application will also control the LED attached to the ESP8266.

In this last section of the workshop looks at how useful information can be extracted from the IoT data using analytics.

We've provided all the links used throughout the workshop as well as links to other resources here to help you explore a little more about IoT.