I’m sure many of you have at least heard of home Automation. There are tons of smart devices out there like Google Home, Amazon Echo etc.. that have exposed us to the world of home automation. To a beginner, it may seem overwhelming. But the reality is, today, home automation has become easy to understand and implement. You too can get started with automating your house in a few hours. So let’s jump into today’s topic
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What is Home Automation ?
I’ll tell you the easy answer. Home automation achieved when some or all the devices in your home perform their functions automatically or with little help from you. Ok, I’m sure a lot of you are confused now, right?
If your garden lights/ outdoor lights automatically turn ON during night time and turn OFF automatically in the morning, then that is sort of a “Home automation”. If your garage door opens automatically when your car comes near it, then that’s also technically part of home automation.
I think you’ve got the idea right. With home automation, we don’t have to bother with remembering to turn off the lights in the morning or getting out of the car to open the garage door. It saves us time and makes our life a little bit easier and perhaps a little lazy.
What is this “ESP8266” ?
ESP8266 is not some random text I just made up. Trust me! Its the name of a little device that can become your best friend once you get to know it. Enough of me beating around the bush, Im sure you all know what Wifi is right? Well, the ESP8266 is the name of a particular WiFi device or rather a WiFi Module. Simply put, this little guy can connect to WiFi and you can teach it to do all sorts of things. By itself its mostly used to give WiFi connectivity to a lot of DIY projects. All we need to know for now is that this little guy can connect to your WiFi just like your smartphone and Laptop can.
Ok, time for some electronics, I know it’s going to be a little boring but bear with me. I try to make this as interesting as I can. The ESP8266 has a microcontroller. This is similar to its brain. You can write a little code and program the brain to do anything you want.
Whats so great about it ?
Having an ESP8266 around is like having a mini computer, without a monitor, keyboard, mouse and all those bulky hardware. As a result, it fits perfectly in very small places. Is small enough to be compared with the size of a coin. So a small size is one thing thats going for this piece of hardware.
Since it does not use any bulky hardware, it doesn’t need a lot of power to run. In
It connects via WiFi, It supports the 802.11 b/g/n protocol, So you don’t have to worry about running LAN cables, you can place it anywhere you want, and it will be always ready to connect to your network
You can reprogram it and write your own code on it. So its like a mini Arduino you can use for small projects.
There are some downsides…
The ESP8266 is not perfect, it definately has its own share of disadvantages.
It’s highly sensitive to voltage. Anything more than 3.6 Volts on any of its pins will kill the chip. It has a very small memory to store your code on, so you cannot write large codes on it. It doesn’t have any input devices or output device you can connect to. It has some pins you can configure to control devices or LED’s but that’s all. You cant connect anything more than that to it. It has only a small number of these pins we can use to connect to small devices like LEDs.
Conclusion
That’s just about all there is to know about these handy circuits. They are definitely a great help for making DIY projects and are widely used in WiFi switches and smart devices. We will soon look into how exactly they can be used in home automation in particular, but that’s a story for another time.
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