Clearly, it’s totally impossible to match the elegance and technology of a Tesla in an almost 25 year old Volkswagen van. Though it would be pretty neat to turn my ‘82 Westy into a more connected car by adding sensors that communicate oil pressure, oil temperature, water level etc. over Wifi using ESP8266 chips to a Raspberry Pi based central unit. During this talk I’ll introduce you to the powerful ESP8266 Wifi chips. They only cost around $3 but, by replacing the firmware, it is possible to program them like an Arduino. It’s fairly easy to connect them to a Wifi network, read the status of the sensors connected to the GPIO ports and send the sensor data to our central unit using MQTT. MQTT offers an extremely lightweight publish/subscribe messaging transport that is perfectly suited for the communication between our sensors and the central unit. The central unit uses Java based software that can give us real time insight in the status of our pretty Westy while we’re inside the van but also remotely through an exposed real time web interface.
Bio van Rob Brinkman Rob is een van de oprichters van JDriven en binnen JDriven primair verantwoordelijk voor de ontwikkeling van zijn collega’s en de organisatie. Op basis van zijn passie voor techniek en ruime ervaring als ontwikkelaar, architect en vakidioot grijpt hij elke kans om de code in te duiken.
