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Need help figuring out simple approach for friendship lamps

PostPosted: Mon Aug 06, 2018 4:49 pm
by freakintoddles
I've build a few nodeMCU esp8266 based smart home controllers around my house, all integrated into SmartThings and so far it has been easy and fun to work with this chipset.

I saw these lamps https://www.uncommongoods.com/product/l ... dship-lamp which are paired together and communicate via the internet to stay in sync with their colors. Fun idea for a distant relative or friend, but also looked way overpriced for what it was to me.

It also seemed like a great candidate for an esp8266 project.

Specifically I'm looking for ideas or examples of how to connect two esp8266's together over the internet reliably, and also how to keep them in sync for the color of the lamp (RGB LED).

It looks like I could use the Blynk platform to accomplish this, but ideally I want to get it working without relying on a 3rd party service, free or otherwise.

I have access to web hosting and was thinking I could have some sort of simple form based page that each esp8266 would check/update as the color was changed on each unit, but I couldn't figure out how the page itself would communicate to the other unit, unless the esp8266 was just programmed to check the page every XX seconds for updates?

Re: Need help figuring out simple approach for friendship la

PostPosted: Fri Aug 10, 2018 11:48 am
by freakintoddles
Bumping for visibility, any ideas?

Re: Need help figuring out simple approach for friendship la

PostPosted: Fri Aug 10, 2018 2:27 pm
by rudy
Have the ESPs (client) connect to the server. Use websockets to communicate both ways (sending status and receiving other unit status). It will pretty much be real time. Now that the hard part is worked out you only need to do is implement the code. ;)

Re: Need help figuring out simple approach for friendship la

PostPosted: Fri Aug 10, 2018 8:04 pm
by freakintoddles
Thanks for the suggestion Rudy! I'm not familiar with websockets, but I'm going to do some googling and see what I can learn.