- Wed Feb 27, 2019 6:35 pm
#80837
I'm new to this forum, excuse me if I posted in the wrong place
Let me introduce myself. I'm completely new to Arduino and have no coding experience (except on Basic 25 years ago). I can call myself a jack of all trades, I do understand how electricity works and have some knowledge on basic electronic components: resistor, capacitor, transistor, diode. Nothing about chips, processors.
About a month ago I watched a video about Node-Red and got all excited, bought RPi3 with bunch of accessories and decided to build control system for outdoor lights.
And actually got prototype working with 8channel relay board connected to gpio pins on rpi. Controlled through a web page driven by nodered. But to actually deploy this setup in my situation is not simple. Mechanical timer for outdoor lights located in detached garage, I was planning to gut it and replace with relays and rpi, but they don't fit. Another issue is that I have one more timer in the basement for outdoor lights around the house. With my approach it would require 2 RPis and additional boxes to hide them. I start looking for other solutions and found ESP8266 with plenty of gpio pins and small form factor.
Yesterday I received 2 units with shields and additional relay boards and spent all night figuring out how to make it work. Totally different animal comparing to rpi, I had to learn how to flash firmware on it, than load a scketch using Arduino Ide, than configure MQTT to talk to it. Thanks to all these tutorials I managed to get it working and I can control one relay on pin D2. Sketch I uploaded meant to read Dht Sensor and one relay, couldn't find one to just control relays. After reading a lot I realized that using gpio pins on ESP8266 is not as simple as on Rpi
Here is the question: Is it possible to utilize 8 gpio pins for relays? Looks like I can only use 5 of them without some special care(beyond my knowledge)
Should I just get 2 more ESP8266 and have each control 4ch relays?
Where do I look for sample sketches?
Let me introduce myself. I'm completely new to Arduino and have no coding experience (except on Basic 25 years ago). I can call myself a jack of all trades, I do understand how electricity works and have some knowledge on basic electronic components: resistor, capacitor, transistor, diode. Nothing about chips, processors.
About a month ago I watched a video about Node-Red and got all excited, bought RPi3 with bunch of accessories and decided to build control system for outdoor lights.
And actually got prototype working with 8channel relay board connected to gpio pins on rpi. Controlled through a web page driven by nodered. But to actually deploy this setup in my situation is not simple. Mechanical timer for outdoor lights located in detached garage, I was planning to gut it and replace with relays and rpi, but they don't fit. Another issue is that I have one more timer in the basement for outdoor lights around the house. With my approach it would require 2 RPis and additional boxes to hide them. I start looking for other solutions and found ESP8266 with plenty of gpio pins and small form factor.
Yesterday I received 2 units with shields and additional relay boards and spent all night figuring out how to make it work. Totally different animal comparing to rpi, I had to learn how to flash firmware on it, than load a scketch using Arduino Ide, than configure MQTT to talk to it. Thanks to all these tutorials I managed to get it working and I can control one relay on pin D2. Sketch I uploaded meant to read Dht Sensor and one relay, couldn't find one to just control relays. After reading a lot I realized that using gpio pins on ESP8266 is not as simple as on Rpi
Here is the question: Is it possible to utilize 8 gpio pins for relays? Looks like I can only use 5 of them without some special care(beyond my knowledge)
Should I just get 2 more ESP8266 and have each control 4ch relays?
Where do I look for sample sketches?
