IoT Starter Kit “ESP”

Description

Practical exercises and use cases are simulated by the IoT hardware and software provided by the teacher. All use cases are hardware independent by nature. However, when students must start implementing the exercise a particular hardware platform must use. Depending on the level of students, teacher can prepare the node and server hardware and software or leave this task to students. In any case, both node and server solution, as well as network infrastructure, must be available and accessible. In IoT, different platforms can be mixed up and connected through the broker services, but in the beginner level, it is better to stick in one hardware platform. In following IoT HomeLab kit platform is proposed and described.

The minimum requirements for IoT system are that there is at least two nodes, broker server, and the network. See the figure below.

Broker server is selected as Mosquitto MQTT broker server and nodes are based on ESP8266 microcontroller blocks, enabling to attach sensor or actuator shield on the top of it.

Node specifications

11 digital input/output pins
Micro USB connector
Compatible with ArduinoIDE
Compatible with Nodemc
4 MB flash-memory

Shields

User Interface Modules

Screen size 64×48 pixels
Driver IC: SSD1306
I2C interface
Ports GPIO4 and GPIO5

8×8 dot matrix LED
8 step adjustable intensity
Port GPIO14 and GPIO3

LED size 5050
16 mil colors
Port GPIO4

Frequency 1kHz-3kHz
4 optional control ports
Port GPIO14

Port GPIO0

Sensor / Actuator Modules

1-wire digital interface
Humidity 0-100±2% RH
temperature -40-80±0,5 °C
Port GPIO2

Sentry angle 110 degree
Sentry distance max 7 m
Port GPIO14 and GPIO2

5V NO/NC 1-channel relay
AC 250V 10A
DC 30V 10A
Port GPIO5

Combined Module

AC current sensor for power consumption

RC servo motor for regulation and small movements

Encoder and switch for odometry or speed measure

Broker Server

Broker server can be implemented in the cloud server, local server or even limited local lightweight server like Raspberry Pi.

MQTTBox

MQTTBox enables to create MQTT clients to publish or subscript topics, create MQTT virtual device networks, load test MQTT devices or brokers and much more. MQTTBox is a cross platform application available on Linux, MAC and Windows.

For this course the MQTT clients is handy tool to monitor the traffic and send messages to the broker. MQTT clients allows: