I was on holiday over the weekend and the unit works like a charm, I was notified of all activities detected by the PIR set above my main door. With wifi_station_set_auto_connect(TRUE) the constant tries to connect to a missing AP or wrong password will run the batteries flat in no time. Default retries is now set to 4 in which after that the ESP8266 will go in deep sleep to conserve power. https://github.com/terenceang/esp8266-PIR
After hacking the hardware, the next part is programming the firmware. The basic flow control is simple. boot log on wifi get time from NTP server (pool.ntp.org) format text with timestamp log on to MQTT broker publish formated text to MQTT broker go into deep sleep. Full source available on GitHub. After I have a decently working firmware, it is time to put everything together. I added a capacitor to the power rails to stabilize and eliminate false trigger. I think the sudden power draw by the ESP8266 somehow caused the BISS0001 to reset and kept the light on. I…
The first ESP8266 project I worked on is a wifi PIR detector. My original plan was to use an cheap Ebay PIR and 3D printed case for this project but I happen to have a spare Ikea Molgan PIR light lying around, I opened it up and take a peek inside and decided to work this hack with it, overall this is an attractive and cheap unit. (SGD$9.90) Removing the top dome was easy as it is friction fitted and held together with some tape, upon closer examination, it uses the same parts as most cheap Ebay PIR, just…