ESP8266 Community Forum

I got a small home automation / datalogging going on.
It is based on a ESP8266, and a homepage/PHP MySQL.

Now I want to add a phone/Tablet to the solution and this is where I need some guidance.

Basicalli I need only to make a small and simple app. But finding the right starting point is a bit challenging. All the solutions that I have found so far seems to fit my needs bad.
Eclipse
Just installing it on my computer took me 2 days last summer. And the emulator does not run on my 8 core Xeon. (I got help from a highly skilled Java guy, and even he was frustrated. For my simple project, it is simply to big and complicated package.
App Inventor
I’m not following this path. Have still not seen anything that really works coming from this path. It seems to be way to limited.
Android Studio
Seems to be almost like Eclipse. Or am I wrong. By the look of what I have seen on YouTube it is almost as overcomplicated as Eclipse. But Im willing to give it a second try.

Any suggestions?

My requiremnts
A two form(Screen) app.
Form 2 that holds a handful buttons and text fields. The button generates a text string that is send to my ESP8266 as a http request. And can read http strings send back.
Form 2 is a setup page where the user can setup prefs and these prefs are loaded upon start of the app.

If Visual Basic was availible for android I could make the hole thing in about an hour or maby 2. So It is a bit frustrating to have to start ell ower with a new IDE, Language and setup.

Have used app inventor a bit. It seems to work for simple projects and is free. No install on PC required.

Hi Peter,

Since you are familiar with VB, B4A (Basic for Android) would be the way to go. Apparently, the environment is very similar and and for people using VB find it second nature.

https://www.b4x.com/b4a.html

Folks speak very highly of the product, and the developer. They also have a very active forum.

For me, the learning curve is/was too steep.

Another approach is to use ready-made dashboard apps available on the Playstore. This makes things VERY easy to cook up fancy looking interfaces for your projects, and is mostly controller independant.

Let me list a few:

1) Roboremo; very popular, extensive help guide. Works well with bluetooth and Wifi.

2) Bluetooth Electronics; great, but uses only bluetooth.

3) Virtuino. Fantastic app, my favourite. Bluettoth OR Wifi, although the Wifi part is somewhat complicated to use unless youre on an Arduino, in which case its a cinch.

After sampling these, I've given up on writing my own code to create dedicated Android apps; you'd be creating fancy looking dashboards within minutes.

Best Regards,

Anand Dhuru

Thank you for your replys guys
I will have to look into roboremo and the other widget based solutions.

I tried the B4A free wersion. It looks just like the right thing, but I have a problem with it. It is based on the Java, and needs Java to run. And im having huge problems wit installing Java on my computer (And getting it to work). This is the main reason for not running a Android Studio solution.
I newer gets the emulator to run properly. I managed to get a version Android 4.2.2 running once yesterday but extremely slow, and only for a few minutes.
My computer is a older HP workstation with 2 zeon quad core processor running at 3GHz and 64 Gb of ram. Not the fastest thing on earth, but it should do the job. But for some unknown (at least to me) reason this model got lots of problem with Java, and android emulators.

But thank you for your sugestions.

Pete