ESP8266 Community Forum

So now that I have a web-controllable AC extension cord, I'm thinking about how to best move forward. I was about to incorporate some Javascript into my project to make the web-interface aware of the switch's state, when it occurred to me that I'd probably be reinventing the wheel. It seems like there should be a framework that allows one to just plug in an ESP8266 enabled device to a network of things that can be controlled with a minimum of fuss.

I've looked at MySensors and it was my front-runner when I was working on Arduino-based projects, but the ESP8266 makes at least one of the MySensors concepts, the gateway, unnecessary. The project seems to be moving to make modifications, but progress is slow.

Thinger.io is interesting. It is a young project and small, but has quickly made a lot of progress and seems to have made the right decisions on a number of points (open source, hardware agnostic). I haven't delved too deeply, but it looks like it could be the ticket. It also looks like one can implement the service locally, rather than depend on something cloud-based.

There must be several other frameworks that are somewhat suitable. If you have some experience with any, feel free to share your findings.

MOSQUITTO also looks like it is worth a look. It is an open source MQTT client and broker implementation. It is BSD licensed.

I've just barely scratched at MOSQUITTO, but it looks like it is reasonably secure, gives one an easy way to build networks of sensors, and that general user interfaces exist (ie. one could use an Android device to browse the MQTT network).

Best of all: No cloud. (I don't want the cloud in my house, thank you.)

Actually you don't need any gateway when when deploying a MySensors node on a ESP module.

You can attach sensors directly to the ESP module and have it communicate with the MySensors protocol (supported by 18+ controllers) wirelessly or use it as a MQTT client for more exotic things like NodeRed/Mosquitto.

Here is the ESP Sensor/Gateway:
https://github.com/mysensors/Arduino/bl ... SP8266.ino

See the other examples for more help on getting started (or visit http://www.mysensors.org).
https://github.com/mysensors/Arduino/tr ... s/examples

The MySensors open source project has "standardised" 37+ sensors types, which works with most controllers.
http://www.mysensors.org/download/serial_api_15

Happy hacking!