I’ve been helping out with an work experience week at the Eden Project developing a sensor network to monitor the Biomes. We used ESP8266 to read sensors, logged the readings to a central server and then displaying that data on displays that allow visitors to see how the conditions in the Biomes change throughout the day.

The event went well and by the end we had a basic walking skeleton to demonstrate to the guests on the final day. The demo consisted of the ESP8266 micro controllers reading data from the sensors, sending it to the core server and the UI TVs pulling the data from the server and displaying it.

I was the mentor for the sensors team, our week consisted of:

Day 1

• The day started with Scrum tennis as a team building exercise.
• TDD training in cyber-dojo.
• An introduction to the project.
• Wiring up the ESP8266 modules on bread boards so we could program them.
• At the end of the day we found that the development tools did not work on the Raspberry Pis we were planning to use, after a quick search on the internet it was decided we would use x86 Linux boxes.

Day 2

• Getting the sensors working
• Setting up a Web Server on the ESP8266

Day 3

• WiFi range testing
• Building PCBs
• Initial development of the code to send the sensor data using a HTTP POST

Day 4 – I wasn’t there so Mike helped the team

Day 5

• More PCB building
• Development of code the calibrate the sensors. We sadly didn’t have time for the code to make it into the final demo

At the end of Day 2 of the Eden of Things it’s customer demo time.