Just picked up one of these neat ePaper displays from AliExpress for $9.90 for the esp8266. It’s 2.13" in diagonal, has a resolution of 250x122 and is made by Lolin.

Lolin produce a whole bunch of quality esp8266 items - including the ubiquitous Wemos D1 Mini and various I2C sensors. It’s not a shield in that you can sit it on top of an ESP - you need a couple of cables to use the lcd with the esp, you’ll want to get the TFT I2C Connector Shield ($0.70) and TFT e-Paper Cable ($0.80).

A minor annoyance, but one that plagues me: when you put a wash on, forget about it finishing, only to discover the damp washing hours later festering in the washing machine. There’s only one thing to it - a massively overengineered smart home solution!

Sonoff POW

This is a smart device that can be had from Chinese online retailers for ~$9 - bargain. In it there’s a wifi microcontroller, the venerable ESP8266, a mains relay and a current/voltage sensor to measure power usage. It’s the power monitoring functionality this hack uses.

This project was to build a simple garage security system to alert of intruder access to the garage by notification over Wifi.

Parts list

Wemos D1 mini & mini protoboard

The esp8266 is the workhorse of any project - it monitors the sensors and sends notifications over Wifi. I used the Arduino system with Platformio for development.

For the small amount of circuitry required one of these tiny protoboards:

CheerLights is an “Internet of Things” project created by Hans Scharler where people volunteer to synchronise their lights all across the world to one colour. In a truly democratic fashion, the colour changes by anyone sending a tweet with a colour

• #cheerlights.

Check out twitter to see it live: #cheerlights.

I wanted to do something with the cheap esp8266 controllers you can get to control 3528 LED strips - it’s a ready built package with the voltage converter, ESP-12S processor and the MOSFETs necessary to switch 12V on the LED strips from the ESP 3.3v pins.

This is a tutorial about how to flash custom firmware onto the ESP8266 in the Sonoff Wireless Smart Switch. The Sonoff is a low cost mains relay with a fully customisable ESP8266 inside. Great for home automation hacking!

Parts list

• Sonoff TH10 or TH16

• A USB to TTL dongle CH340G (FT232RL or PL2303 based will also do), to flash the new firmware.

• A 3.3V breadboard power supply (only required for testing, safer than using mains!)