Internet of Things

Behind the IoT revolution are tiny, incredibly cheap micro controllers capable of connecting to external networks without much hassle. An example is the now ubiquitous ESP8266, available for about 2 € and about the size of your thumbnail. This workshop provides a step-by-step tutorial to make use of this controller for custom applications.

IoT gadgets are usually black boxes offering some neat features like answering your doorbell from work.

But IoT has a darker side, too. Be it shoddy code publicly exposing your personal data, weaknesses easily exploitable to turn your toaster into a botnet, or gathering masses of data to train neural nets for predicting your behavior.

So, out with the black boxes! Lets reclaim our devices, and make our own instead 🙂

What happened in your workshop?
In this workshop, we gave you a basic toolset of hardware and software to send, route and receive messages from connected devices.

Who was the target audience of your workshop?
Physical Computing tinkerers who want to build a network of connected devices and people interested in robust future compatible messaging protocols.

What did attendees of your workshop learn?

We used

• the Wemos D1, a cheap carrier board with a ESP8266 module and a handy USB interface as hardware,
• MQTT as our protocol
• and Node-Red to route our messages arround.

In detail, we did

• Set up our development environment
  • Setting up a MQTT Broker, either on your computer or on a Raspberry Pi
  • Setting up Node-red, an IoT focused tool from IBM
  • Installing the needed libraries for programming the ESP8266 in the Arduino IDE
• Get physical buttons sending messages
• Build a 30 second UI in node-red send and receive our messages
• Receive a message and turn a light or motor on
• Get one or two sensors sending messages
• Set up vvvv to send and receive messages