I stumbled into, and was tempted by, an V2EX thread several weeks ago about embedded programming and the ESP8266 module. This is a trivial attempt at making a weather station.

The project utilizes one ESP8266 devboard and one ESP32 devboard to send the temperature, relative humidity, air pressure, soil moisture, etc. to a home server, which runs a simple Flask app on Debian (via Gunicorn) to receive GET requests and display the data on demand.

Code for both devboards and the Flask app can be found on Github.

What I’ve gained

• Some experience in:
  • Arduino / embedded programming
  • Soldering (due to two sensors only available in semi-completed form: BMP085 (air pressure) and GY302 (light level))
  • Flask / Python
• A lot of fun

Photos

Known issues

• The solar panel solution doesn’t really work as-is, due to the power bank shutting off automatically (presumabaly as power outflow is too small).
• I couldn’t get the ESP8266 to properly enter deep sleep and wake up, so it draws full power (albeit not a lot) constantly right now.
• Despite taking precaution to escape the GET requests, I am pretty sure the Flask app is not safe. The server is only accessible via Tailscale externally, so this is not a huge problem.