Guysoft's Weblog

MtigOS – Plotting sensor data from ESP8266, where all of the work has been done for you March 2, 2020

Raspberry Pi and esp8266 to give fancy graphs

Hey all,

This project started from a hackathon, where the organiser dumps a pile of esp8266 chips and sensors on a table that were up for grabs. I wanted build something that would take about 10 seconds to assemble and flash, and would be functional anywhere, no hardcoding of wifi settings and servers. Since I am the developer of CustomPiOS I also made a Raspberry Pi distro that has all the fancy dashboards pre-installed.

This work is also modular and written in a way you could build long lasting solutions, the code is all arranged so it’s easy to contribute and have a monitoring solution which is easy to customize.

What I am going to provide here is a set of tools, that would let you get pretty graphs from sensors with:

1. NO coding required
2. NO hardcoded wifi passwords or server settings
3. NO soldering
4. About 2-5 minutes assemble the hardware
5. You get a standard which is supported in my dsitro and other devices. So you can use MQTT apps that are out there.
6. Raspberry Pi image that sets up all the software that lets you see fancy graphs right away. Calling it MtigOS. It also automatically updates and is maintained.
7. You are going to use Docker, without the need to know how to use Docker.

Cool tricks I am going to use:

1. You press the reset button a couple of times to enter a web config interface available in an access point so you can set up your wifi and MQTT server
2. I am saving you hosting this on a server and giving you the option to host this locally using a Raspberry Pi image.
3. docker + docker-compose that sets up a database and graphing tool – everything is already all set up. So if you want a server instead of a Raspberry Pi you can use that too
   no need to know docker.

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