[chbot] On the scrounge for an esp8266 board

[Andy Gardner]

On 9/01/19 3:41 PM, Dave Bracken wrote:
> Andy,
> Was there a particular reason you ruled out the NodeMCU plugin for the Arduino IDE?  If you haven't looked at it, it might get you started more quickly.  From what you told me, the Arduino IDE should be able to do most of the things you need but I appreciate there's a lot of possible solutions out there and if you have a preference for developing on a Linux platform, that adds other angles.

Definitely has to be on Linux.

  A quick proof of concept could be to follow the destructions on https://www.instructables.com/id/Quick-Start-to-Nodemcu-ESP8266-on-Arduino-IDE/ as the example code that gets downloaded will get it connected to your wifi and a web interface for blinky etc.

Thanks I take a look at that. The final target is a bare bones esp8266 with a si4703 FM Tuner module, 2 x 18650 LiIon 2 x charge controller and 2 x 5v solar panel, in a box with whip antenna. Able to be sent to friends with zero skills to auto link into their wireless network and then be mounted up a pole and left there until something kills it.

Unit will sleep mostly, wake up and check signal levels etc on all FM broadcast channels and if something has changed, fire up the wireless link and make contact with the mothership via MQTT, then go back to sleep.

I've got the mothership up and running - Mosquitto + https://github.com/curzon01/mqtt2sql + Apache ModPERL

> Please feel free to call in if I can be of help writing some code.

That would be great. My brain only has space inside for one programming language and that's PERL. I've done some fairly artistic stuff with PERL over the years but this C stuff is a little beyond me.

Cheers,

Andy

> 
> Dave