David @dynamicdave and Paul @zenofmud are pleased to announce the release of their Grow Frame AKA Remotely Controlled Station based on an ESP32-S2 Mini flashed with MicroPython.
This practical project started out as a simple temperature sensor for a grow frame (a miniature greenhouse designed to cultivate seedlings prior to planting them out in a garden) for my son-in-law. Like a number of our projects it grew and grew (no pun intended) as more functionality was added.
The final result is a node that can be deployed to sense temperature, humidity and air pressure in any geographical location. All it needs is access to a WiFi Access Point and a (local or remote) MQTT broker.
Although the nodes shown here are fitted with a BME280 t/h/p sensor it could be fitted with a set of switches, an OLED panel or use the I/O pins to drive LEDs or relays.
The node can also read voltages via any pins that have been configured as analog inputs.
Once we had added this extra functionality we thought a better name might be... "Remotely Controlled Station" because as you will find out, if you read the Tutorial on our website Share_My_Projects, it can be controlled remotely and configured from Node-RED.
Here's a view of the Tutorial's front cover - it runs to 19-pages of useful material.
A Node-RED dashboard is used to monitor the readings and change the parameters in the remote node.
We have created this website Share_My_Projects where you can find...
- The detailed Tutorial about how to build and operate the project
- The MicroPython script for this project
- The MicroPython libraries used in this project
- Scripts to set-up the config files
- A script to calcuate the scaling-factor for the analog channels
- A simple Node-RED flow to test the Remotely Controlled Station
- A simple Node-RED flow to monitor readings obtained from the node
We hope you enjoy reading about our project and building one yourself.
