ESP8266 Community Forum

Hi Everyone,

Got some ESP8266's and trying to put some serial data coming from a wind speed/direction sensor onto the internet so people can access the data with their web browsers.

I've learned enough to talk to the ESP8266 and get it connected to our router but that is where I run into a blank wall.

The wind sensor is sending wind speed/direction serial data once per second at 4800 baud. Any information on how I can get the ESP8266 to make this data available on the internet would be greatly appreciated.

Regards,

Bert van den Berg

Howdy Bert,
The first thing you are going to want to think about is whether you want the data made available as a REST request so that 3rd parties can grab the latest wind speed or whether you want to have a web page that contains the wind speed. Have you given any thought to those notions?

Neil

kolban wrote:Howdy Bert,
The first thing you are going to want to think about is whether you want the data made available as a REST request so that 3rd parties can grab the latest wind speed or whether you want to have a web page that contains the wind speed. Have you given any thought to those notions?

Neil

Hi Neil,

I downloaded your 220 page book and a few days ago and started reading until page 44 at which point my eyes started to glaze over.

I proceeded to scan the remaining 180 pages and it seems that those pages deal primarily with programming the ESD8266 in it's native code. Although this may be appropriate for me in the future, it means having to learns a whole lot of new stuff. At this point I would like to take the easiest path and use a small microcontroller to send instructions to the ESP8266 to put data onto the network.

It would be great to have the data available by someone just pointing their browser to an IP address but if necessary I would dig deeper and put the data onto a page on our business website. Since our website is written in straight HTML code this might not be easy for me.

Is this possible or am I barking up the wrong tree?

Regards,

Bert

Howdy Bert,
I think our challenge will be elaborating on "send instructions to the ESP8266 to put data onto the network". Unfortunately one doesn't just "push data" onto the Internet and there it is ... wish it were that simple. Classically, what one does is have a Web Server which sends HTML pages to a browser. Within your web page, you typically have JavaScript which makes an AJAX call to service provider to get data. That data is then received by the browser and the JavaScript then interprets the data and inserts it into the web page usually by changing the DOM model.

The ESP8266 should be acting as an endpoint for an AJAX call presumably arriving via a REST request. When the ESP receives that request it should poll the sensor, retrieve the data and send that back to the caller. This can be done all on-board the ESP or in combination with an Arduino using the AT command interfaces.

Now ... this does indeed sound like gobbldy gook but it is what it is ... maybe there is an opportunity here for a generic project that that does 99% of the work for us and merely opens up the place where we "plug in sensor data here" .... but I don't think there is such a sample yet ... but it does sound like a good idea.

Neil