I've done quite a bit of playing around with the ESP8266 boards - but not related to the WeatherDuino. I've had one in a modified solar garden light about 30m from the house, reporting in its battery voltage every 5 minutes. It's been running reliably for six months now, so not bad as a "proof of concept".
I can see two obvious potential applications for them in the WeatherDuino system:
1. Replace the crusty 433MHz radios with ESP8266 boards - the range of those things is amazing. The downside is that the extra current drain may be an issue for solar powered Tx units. (There are sophisticated power saving modes for the ESP, so this is not an insurmountable problem).
2. Add an ESP8266 to the Tx board (or the Rx - but it has very little spare RAM to handle the extra code) to directly output weather data to an MQTT (Mosquitto) server so that the information is available to other systems - e.g. for controlling an air conditioner or closing curtains when the sun sets.
I already take data from the WeatherDuino and publish it to an MQTT server, but I'm using Cumulus MX to write the data to a MySQL database, then scraping it from MySQL into MQTT. This approach has proven to be surprisingly reliable, but has too many moving parts to potentially go wrong and/or delay updates.
I can see two obvious potential applications for them in the WeatherDuino system:
1. Replace the crusty 433MHz radios with ESP8266 boards - the range of those things is amazing. The downside is that the extra current drain may be an issue for solar powered Tx units. (There are sophisticated power saving modes for the ESP, so this is not an insurmountable problem).
2. Add an ESP8266 to the Tx board (or the Rx - but it has very little spare RAM to handle the extra code) to directly output weather data to an MQTT (Mosquitto) server so that the information is available to other systems - e.g. for controlling an air conditioner or closing curtains when the sun sets.
I already take data from the WeatherDuino and publish it to an MQTT server, but I'm using Cumulus MX to write the data to a MySQL database, then scraping it from MySQL into MQTT. This approach has proven to be surprisingly reliable, but has too many moving parts to potentially go wrong and/or delay updates.