[chbot] Robotics Group meeting, Monday 18 Dec 2017 6:30pm, 5 Idris Road - Low cost ESP32 special

[Mark Atherton]

Hello everyone,

Just a quick reminder that our next meeting is on Monday. Please bring 
along any projects that you have been working on, along with a healthy 
curiosity, and maybe some off-the-wall ideas and suggestions.

As usual, the evening will start with an informal get together. Around 
7:30 (maybe a bit later) we move into the more formal 
unprepared-talks-from-the-front. This is a very low-key event with 
people arriving and leaving as they feel fit.

Special speaker for the evening : Robin Gilks, and a detailed report on 
progress with his low cost WiFi/IoT project. See below.

Happy to accept small stuff for the trading table, but we can't accept 
CRT based product, or large plastic items such as printers or scanners.

Given that this is our Christmas get together, silly hats, open sauce 
nibbles, and a double-extra helping of cheer (or was it beer) will go 
down a treat.

As usual, guests are most welcome, and hope to see you there.

Regards, Mark

----

Robin Gilks has made progress with a (very) low cost wireless / IoT 
system based on the ESP32. He will be giving an extended demo of his 
project. He has the following to say about his talk

"I started with the 'mongoose' embedded web server some 7-8 years ago 
for my irrigation controller that runs on a wireless router under 
'openwrt'. The guys that developed it have used the networking to 
produce something useful for small embedded IoT systems.

I will be demonstrating the productivity of developing an IoT device 
where 90% of the 'nitty gritty' is already done for you and you get a 
lot of features 'for free' including : OTA update of firmware with 
rollback, built in flash encryption, multiple hardware platforms, 
prototyping in javascript, production in C/C++, all with a GPLv2 or 
Commercial license

This page gives a nice overview and is where I started 
https://mongoose-os.com/docs/book/intro.html. I installed the s/w 
following: https://mongoose-os.com/docs/quickstart/setup.html. I then 
moved onto running a couple of the examples: 
https://mongoose-os.com/docs/quickstart/using-javascript.html

That is as far as I've got for the purposes of the talk, I'll show the 
results of an hour of hacking existing code to make something different.