(Part 2) Best products from r/esp8266

Nah it's not so complicated. Andreas Spiess has a great series of videos about it. Most of it is plug-and-play, LoRa has gotten a lot of attention, so support is actually quite good.

• Overview
  
• Building a full-blown gateway based on a RasPi
  
• A cheaper single-channel gateway (might still be sufficient for your needs)
  
• An even cheaper ESP8266 gateway
  
  Dragino also makes a LoRaWAN gateway based on OpenWRT that's about $100, though I haven't used one myself and they seem to be a bit hard to find but they seem to be perfect for a lot of these type applications. And these are pretty good as sensor nodes, with onboard radios and battery management. You could just add a BME280 sensor and boom, pressure/temperature/humidity sensor. The mega328 is way way better at power efficiency than the ESP too, a year on batteries is no problem.
  
  An even more budget friendly approach might be to use the long range nrf24 radio modules with MySensors mesh networking. You'd probably need to set up some powered repeater nodes, but those things are dirt cheap, low power and reliable and MySensors is stupidly easy to use.

hey, the relay won't work very well if you're using RGB LEDs. One of the coolest features of RGB is the ability to mix colours by pulsing each in sequence for different amounts of time. The relay may not be able to switch fast enough, and you'd need of for each 'colour'.

Personally I don't find the Reddit format to be the best for asking these types of questions, as often the 'popular vote' goes to the answers that are short and easy to understand, which may not be the 'best' answer. I prefer http://www.eevblog.com/forum/index.php and the related electronics vblogs, and https://electronics.stackexchange.com/.

For a great mid-range multimeter I love the Extech EX330 (https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/B000EX0AE4/ref=oh_aui_search_detailpage?ie=UTF8&psc=1), especially with its built-in non-contact voltage detection for working on household wiring (not related, but it's so handy!). The Fluke 87-V is, in my opinion, the cream of the crop and priced accordingly. There are cheap multimeters for $5 that will get the job done, and I do keep these in my vehicles -- eBay and a month of shipping time works well here. Searching eevblog.com for "shootout" (search Google for "site:eevblog.com shootout") reveals great comparisons, too many to read through but indulge the a bit to get a feel for what to look for.

Forgive the 100% newbness, but I'm thinking of doing this as my first electronics project (I'm a software engineer by day).

I created a slightly different parts list through adafruit.com here: ESP8266 BTC ticker parts.

The main differences are:

• Instead of the FTDI Basic Breakout, I'm hoping to use the FTDI Serial TTL-232 USB Cable
  
• I swapped the Monochrome 0.96" 128x64 OLED for the Monochrome 128x32 I2C OLED
  
• I couldn't find 330 ohm resistors, wondering if 220 ohm or 470 ohm would suffice?
  
  Do you think I could work through the tutorial with my altered parts lists? Also, how to power this device on its own? Should I purchase a battery as well?
  
  Thanks for any help in advance!

This is the polar opposite of SMD, but I thought I'd share my solution...

While I love DIY, smoke detectors are important. I wanted to interface with my home system but without compromising the integrity of the system.

Get a 120v first alert.
First Alert SA521CN Wireless Interconnected Hardwired Photoelectric Smoke Alarm with Battery Backup https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000EVO9D4

Get the smart relay interconnect.
BRK RM4 Smart Relay for First Alert https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0039PF21U
This includes schematic for wiring to the detector and the color codes for NO/NC relay connection.

~~Get an optocoupler or isolation relay. Mains Voltage! The output of the RM4 is 120V.
Enclosed AC/DC Power Relay with Protection & De-Bounce. Screw Terminals. 120V Trigger Input. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B017743I7S
The RM4 output powers the relay. The screw terminals connect to the 8266.~~

Get a Esp8266; Flash tasmota firmware. Configure for switch and mqtt. Wire it up.
First Alert is now part of the matrix.

Quick update: Did not need the second relay/optocoupler. The BRK RM4 is an isolated relay. Their docs did not make that perfectly clear so I assumed worst case w/o testing it.

Inspired by /u/commanderkull's post here, I turned an LED-matrix into a performance monitoring tool for my Linux PC. In the gif I am stopping+restarting a Windows VM to show what it looks like when the load changes (of course Windows blue screens, right?)
I wrote a small server to grab the current CPU, memory, and swap usage of my system when the ESP8266 requests it. The ESP8266 then parses the the string and lights the LEDs as necessary.
I have CPU usage displayed in blue LEDs, memory in green, and swap in red. The three colors are added together when displayed (i.e., all the LEDs turn right if each of the above are at 100%)
The code can be found on my GitHub. It's quick and likely dirty, but it gets the job done. The server doesn't cleanly handle the client disconnected+reconnecting right now, but I might add that in the future. As I hinted above, the server only works on Linux right now. Feel free to fork my repo to add Windows support if you like.
This is my first project that I'd consider more or less complete, but it could stand to look a bit nicer. If anyone has any suggestions for that, I'm all ears.

Compnents used:
NodeMCU ESP8266
LED Matrix
Misc. jumper wires

I have one of these and with a little minor soldering skills you can flash them. They aren't super bright but work pretty well. I have the AiLight firmware on them.

Smart WiFi Bulb,Weton Smart LED Bulb Multicolored Light Bulbs Work with Amazon Alexa Google Home, No Hub Required,Remote Control via Free App for Android & all Smartphones,Dimmable Light Sunrise Light https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0796RFMV3/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_40DLBb49GWJS8

There are devices like this one on amazon for under $10 which do what you want.

I don't want to discourage you from a DIY project as I personally appreciate a reason to build something. If you are wanting to pursue this to learn about the ESP8266 and building circuits, sounds like a great project. If you are just looking for a simple solution, I've used the $10 above for years and it has worked fine.

I purchased this $15 Vastar after reading a recommendation somewhere on reddit. I've only used it a few times, but it's so far worked much better than the other inexpensive irons I've had.

I doubt it works as well as a $100 iron, but I haven't come across a bad review, it seems to do just fine for what I'm using it for, and I've been happy with the price.

Thanks for pointing me/us to that. It would be great to grab a constant current sink (I believe similar to this) with a DSO and create an updated set of measurements for devices currently on the market to see if the quality standards have improved.

I was going to buy one of those from them, but they want $13.50 for shipping on a $15 item. They seriously need some better shipping options there.

Maybe they're selling through Amazon so I'll check there.

Aliexpress has most boards for pretty much as expensive as they are in the us.

Edit: this doesn't seem too bad if I take prime shipping into account: SparkFun (PID 13907) ESP32 Thing https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01MG9BNEN/

I don't need to save space at all, but the board is already very tiny!

Is the wemos d1 already the ESP + the connector to the PC?
I cannot buy it on amazon in my country, they are out of items, but I'm also afraid of it being too expensive if I buy many.

I found that amazon ships 1 esp8266 for 6,99€ or 9,99€, but they have this "XCSOURCE ESP8266 D1 Mini NodeMcu Lus"

Which looks a lot like the wemos..
The price is good, I guess, 6.99€ again.

If I buy many, I'd go with ths option https://www.amazon.de/MagiDeal-ESP8266-ESP-12E-Wireless-Seriell/dp/B01C2I7FLO/ref=pd_sim_107_9?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=WM2EAPRYJSH4H249Y86Y

Because what I wanna do is to put on of these and a relay into every outlet/socket (or most of them) and lightswitch in my apartment to controll the light and power sockets via a websever.

I think most stuff fits into our euro-outlets, so size should not be a problem..

Wow! Hold up... no dis intended. I admit I am struggling to see your vision here but i dont mean any personal insult at all.

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>Hue doesn't run an esp chip. Coin cell motion sensors don't run esp chips. This forum is about esp chips and among other things extending their functionality in interesting ways.

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I only brought up hue and the motion sensors (I actually DO use motion sensors connected to ESPs for this btw in 3D printed cases that hang nicely on my wall and can be interfaced with my home assistant server but thats beside the point I suppose) as an alternative because the ESP does not seem like the ideal use case here in terms of making a combined...thing. Im still hung up on how it would be efficient in a socket adapter however your comment maybe brought up that we are possibly not talking about the same thing. You mentioned in your other comment that Sonoff made a socket adapter and no i had not heard of that so i went to look and i see THIS being called a socket adapter but what I have been picturing is THIS so maybe we are not discussing the same thing here.

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Adding the sensors at the outlet level would make a little more sense to me but I would still question how to find a right balance for triggering the PIR sensor to turn the light on as depending on what room it was in there could be a lot interference with that from normal foot traffic, furniture, etc that I would worry would get in the way. Also temperature sensors are usually mounted on the center of a wall in a central location in the room to maximize the chance of getting an average temperature for the space. Putting it at the floor level would make it less accurate since it would likely be cooler or warmer closer to the floor depending on the house but that would be very dependent on the location.

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EDIT: Nevermind found THIS. I was not aware Sonoff made these.

Personally, I'd go with the ESP+Relay. It might not be the simplest way to do this, but it'll be the cheapest and you'll learn more. It'll be easier to implement the DFPlayer into the ESP than it would be to modify the firmware on a Sonoff/Shelly to do it.

You could get something like this TTGO T8 board on Amazon that has a MicroSD slot on board, hook up an I2S amp breakout like this for $6 and playback audio directly from the board.

I've been happy with my $50 X-Tronic 3020-XTS. I had a $8 RadioShack soldering iron before and this one is like 100x better. The heat up time is like 10 seconds.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01DGZFSNE/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_S4BpzbHS13342

I've had good luck with buck converters. They're nice and small, easy to wire