Simple Home Automation

This project was more of a self-study exercise and to turn my ESP8266 (NodeMCU) into something useful and practical.

My home has very old AC Units that I cannot replace, but I wanted to have a better control and got tired of looking for the remote control.

Not so smart AC

So I got some IR LEDs and my ESP8266 and built this little thing:

Not pretty, but it works. 

It is placed in a corner on top of my closet. Two IR LEDs are attached with connectors to the main unit. The first LED goes to the AC Unit in the main room. The second room right next to the main room, and there is a tiny gap in between the walls where I put the cable through for the second LED.

Looks like this:

Maybe I should use a magnet to attach the LED...

The Web Interface:

Just simple HTML with a dash of bootstrap and fontawesome to make it look nice. Haven't done web development in a long time. I forgot how tedious JQuery is...

Another shot of the webinterface:

JSON & OTA 

I also got started using ArduinoJSON and ArduinoOTA with this project. JSON makes the data handling and command forwarding more convenient. Over the Air Updates are also useful, so I don't have to connect the device with USB and can update the firmware as needed on the fly.