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So I'm building a monitor so my father in law can check on the pump that pulls water from the creek without him having to go out to the pump house. We'll be using wifi repeaters to take the signal all the way out to the pump house. The pump's status can be viewed in the house on a PC in the windows system tray so you can tell if it's idle or running, or the tank is full.
It requires a tiny computer to be installed in the pumphouse and then wired up to the pump. I chose an Arduino Mega 2560 with an ESP8266 wifi adapter. It is expected to send a UDP datagram every half second reporting the pump status.
I finally got the ESP8266 wifi library installed in my Arduino programming environment so I can use wifi with this little tiny computer. I bought a wifi module separately and planned to wire it up, but there are power supply problems so I'm buying an arduino mega 2560 with wifi built in this time.
I already wrote the software for the computer end of what I'm building so I'm almost there.
I wrote the software in a couple of hours, the hardware has taken a day so far, probably 2 or 3 by the time I'm done.
It's a bit more of a pain than I was hoping, particularly trying to install the libraries for the esp8266 and getting them to work with the development environment but i did get through it. The first time is always the roughest, but this was compounded by the fact that there's more than one library.
Anyway, I can see the end of this now. Thank heaven they have a board with wifi on it already. That was way more trouble than it was worth, as documentation online on how to wire it up was conflicting. Plus the stock power supply on the arduino doesn't have enough juice to power an external wifi widget.
I'm sure some of you are better at this than me, since I haven't done much circuit building since I was a child - before I discovered programming mostly - but I'm pretty proud of what I've accomplished with this so far. 
Real programmers use butterflies
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Well done on getting it working - as I said before - article please
"I didn't mention the bats - he'd see them soon enough" - Hunter S Thompson - RIP
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pkfox wrote: article please
There are already many articles on CP covering this ... (but of course none with a codewitch flavour).
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I dunno what wifi repeaters are worth, but I'd perhaps have considered Nordic's NRF24L01(+) instead. You can get em with a high-power output stage and antenna for about 2 australian pesos.
They're good for 1000 meters and you can run em with either an arduino pro mini for about 4 bucks or an stm32f103c8t6 ('BluePill' arm micro) for about 2. The arm runs at 72 mega-hurts(spelling intentional) - yee-har!
BatFluSoupVirus has seen me get back into 'tronics too. At the moment, I've been scoping everything in sight with the new 4-channel toy from Siglent while I wait for the debugging/programming cable for the stm32 boards. I'm building a couple of touch-screen spot-welders using old microwave transformers.
Much smiling, hat tipping and congratulations for your speedy execution of the project. 
Great stuff. (an article would be very happily received)
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Looking at that it's interesting but it looks like the only way to use it is to use something like an arduino on either end, right? There's no USB hookup for this widget from what I see, so on the PC end I'd have to bridge it with an arduino or just take the PC out of the loop. That's a first impression though, and I'm not 100% I have enough of the picture with this product to even say that. One of my concerns might be learning curve getting it going.
Real programmers use butterflies
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That's a very good point you make about the house's end-point - it would indeed need another micro there and the Blue Pill boards don't have native USB connectivity. Sure, they've got a micro socket, but you'd have to find a software stack to do the talking.
Didn't even think of that. I'm claiming blindness due to the array of sub USD$10 of screens I've got sitting around here. The 320x240 touchscreens were about 30 aussie pesos for the pair of em, conveniently coming with a 128mbit spi flash chip too (which wasn't mentioned at all in the listing)
I think back in horror to my uni days, when we were expected to make a system around a Motorolla 68k cpu. This stuff is so easy and cheap now. 2 or 3 bucks is what an sms capable kit cost me (just have to solder the parts to the board)
Sounds like we may each have an interesting article to write. 
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enhzflep wrote: I think back in horror to my uni days, when we were expected to make a system around a Motorola 68k CPU.
Horror?! Programming those processors was fun! 32 bit design, orthogonal instruction set, much easier to program than the Intel 8086, 80186, and 80286!
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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Oh yeah, totally.
Very different to look back on it 20 years later than it was at the time. I was only interested in the programming, but had to design and build the system first - not really my idea of fun back then. I'd been writing assembler since high-school and burning my fingers soldering and putting components in back to front a while already..
Still remember the first time I used a 64 bit mips machine in the 90s - Say whaaaaat!? I can have an array HOW big?  
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absolutely. I'm interested in those radios though. they might be good for controlling drones or something.
Real programmers use butterflies
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Turnigy & Flysky used to use the A7105 chipset from AMICCOM. They had great reception, channel hopping and interference suppression. (Easier to interface to, too) Also cheap, no idea how easy/hard it is to buy one with a high-power output stage.
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honey the codewitch wrote: I'm pretty proud of what I've accomplished with this so far.
And so you should be. It sounds like a very useful and practical addition to the family's home.
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sounds very cool, good luck with your project!
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Great project, kudos to you. The 'rents are fortunate to have you.
I did similar, helping a friend gather data from a bunch of IoT controllers (Temp, relays and switches), all to a syslog server console program in C#. The temp sensors are one wire bus sensors, wired to the controllers.
Uses UDP, which risks losing a packet here and there but nothing is mission critical. I doubt that anything Windows, or most Linux distros, are real time anyway.
So far, not a problem. An interesting (to me) wrinkle: I am now rewriting same using a Raspberry Pi, running Blazor (hosting the syslog server). That way, anyone on the LAN can connect via browser. Work in progress.
Arduino's are fun, worked with grandson a few years ago, built a 3 wheel robot of sorts. Another back burner project is a kiln temp controller with the arduino.
If you can keep your head while those about you are losing theirs, perhaps you don't understand the situation.
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The idea of a wifi repeater is a good one. I think you are doing it in a bit more specialized way than I probably would. There are generic ones that have just an RJ45 input plug. Using one of those should eliminate the need for specialized software and make it look like it sat on the other end of a Cat5 cable. That would be the hope anyway.
"They have a consciousness, they have a life, they have a soul! Damn you! Let the rabbits wear glasses! Save our brothers! Can I get an amen?"
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Communicating with the arduino over ethernet is about the same as making it communicate over wifi in terms of wiring it up** and coding it.
**assuming it's not built in - mine isn't.
Real programmers use butterflies
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I see. Best of luck with it.
"They have a consciousness, they have a life, they have a soul! Damn you! Let the rabbits wear glasses! Save our brothers! Can I get an amen?"
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Congratulations on actually getting the wifi working!
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Thanks but I haven't gotten the wifi working all the way through just yet - still waiting for my arduino with integrated wifi to arrive in the mail - should be here tomorrow. I have all the code to flash to it when it gets here though. And I have the PC end of things sorted like i said. So I'm really close.
Real programmers use butterflies
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Defo article material
"I didn't mention the bats - he'd see them soon enough" - Hunter S Thompson - RIP
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I'll get there but at the very least I want it to be a proof of concept. We still need some outdoor wifi repeaters to install it on its final location but right now I'm just getting the stuff to talk to each other.
Real programmers use butterflies
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If you're blue and you don't know where to go
Why don't you try the covid task
Puttin' on the mask
Different types of wear all day, coats with sass
Well hydrated and sipping Plaquenil filled flasks
Puttin' on the mask
Dressed up like a million dollar trooper
Trying hard to look like Gary Cooper
Super-duper!
Come lets mix where Rockerfellers
Walk with sticks or umbrellas as you multitask,
Puttin' on the mask
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And don't forget: eat a Taco first!
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The mexican sort or the Dutch original?
I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them were cats.
His last invention was an evil Lasagna. It didn't kill anyone, and it actually tasted pretty good.
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Accompanying tab please ( piano and guitar )
"I didn't mention the bats - he'd see them soon enough" - Hunter S Thompson - RIP
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