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Comment by StavrosK | Hacker News Reader

The cost is $4 for a NodeMCU, $2 for the sensors, $1 for a breadboard to stick them on, and $1 for a microUSB cable to power them from. You can power the sensors from the NodeMCU's Vin, since that's the 5V from the USB.

I have done exactly this, it sends values to an MQTT server on my NAS every second or so, which the NAS then adds to Graphite and plots them in Grafana. It also has some logic to act on these values and send commands back, like turning lights on and off, etc.

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All that terminology at a really low cost, awesome.

I feel like this comment could be turned into a popular blog post.

I can write up the sensor setup I have at home, if you want. It has motion, temperature, humidity, light sensors and IR/RF remotes for controlling devices, and a burglar alarm.

Please do write about it. Personally, I'll be happy to steal as many ideas as I can for my upcoming home installation :).

Great, I'll give it a shot tomorrow. I also have a mini-ecosystem of Python scripts to communicate with the sensors over serial and to read values, etc. I'll post that as well.

Great! :). Will be refreshing /new/ tomorrow.

Hmm, it looks like I open-sourced most of it a while ago (way to go, past me!):

https://github.com/skorokithakis/ArduiRC

I'll write up the details, but this is a good chunk of it.

I JUST started this exact functionality to communicate with a wireless scale, thanks for sharing!

You're welcome, I'm working on some NodeMCU-based designs now, with IR as well.

So, where's the Show HN? ;).

Man, I spent all day yesterday trying to reimplement the sensor for the ESP8266, as I thought it would be better to have it report over MQTT, but the damn thing keeps crashing in seconds. I literally cannot keep it working for more than a few seconds, no matter what I do.

I'm pretty disheartened, I'll try some more and either succeed or go back to an Arduino over serial... Do you have any experience with making it not crash?

Sadly, my ESP8266 experience is only about to start next week, I'm still abroad. But from the experiences of some of my friends, consider replacing the firmware on the ESP - some units were apparently sold with buggy one that made the module crash after short time.

Good luck!

Yeah, I've tried flashing the Arduino firmware (I think it gets flashed every time regardless). I'll keep trying and let you know, thanks!

By the way, if you don't want to keep checking the comments, you can follow me on Twitter at @stavros and experience my frustration first-hand. I'll be posting about it there.

I'm using HN Notify, so I generally get replies straight to my inbox (except some weird bug once that made the service not work for me for like a month or two). But yeah, maybe Twitter is a better place to have real-time updates. Will be following. Thanks :).

I just got it to run, yay! Things are going well, and MQTT functionality has been working well for the past hour. Just checking in :P

Copy that!

Perfect, thanks, I'll have a look at the NodeMCU, looks like exactly what I'm after.

The nodemcu is definitely the sweet spot. It saves you the trouble of power management, is breadboard friendly, and integrates the programmer. It's way easier to work with than the base ESP-01.

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