Can someone ELI5 what can be accomplished with these devices?
I am not familiar with them, and the build looks simple - but what do once created? Is it simply a BLE beacon?
I am not familiar with them, and the build looks simple - but what do once created? Is it simply a BLE beacon?
MQTT is a messaging protocol used to communicate with the device. You can use something like Mosquitto to communicate with your new IoT device. It is lightweight protocol and easy to work with.
You'd use something like an ESP32 – which has Bluetooth – if you want a simple BLE beacon, otherwise if you don't need Bluetooth then an ESP8266 device would likely work better.; If you want to look at related videos, I'd suggest looking at the YouTube channel Andreas Spiess publishes with various devices. He has a few videos on BLE and ESP32 (ex: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNoFdKgvskU) where he goes into detail.
It's a real-world-to-web interface.
So, ostensibly - if you have these all participate in an SSID of e.g. "sensors", then you can place these all over and have a low-cost mechanism to deliver the reads to your (already) existing wifi infra...
So the key, then, is the family of sensor types you want to place on them. The limitations in the case of this object are power and size....
So given that - whats the minimum size battery req'd to run this little guy?
Then What is the power req of the sensors you attach -- then whats the lifespan of that power budget and then servicability to replace it?
I like this... a lot.
I have a bunch of BLE sensor beacons from china which cost ~8 but they are dumb as rocks.
This provides a heck of a lot more functionality than those...
Unless there are gotcha's which I am naive to?
Most boards and sensors use either 5 or 3.3 volts DC.
You can put the device in a sleep or hibernate mode and have it only connect to wifi periodically or when triggered.
Also, using encryption, like WPA2 increases battery use.