GUI with Touch — for ESP32, RPi & Co.

Many projects with a microcontroller inside have to display something. In the past, 2-line text displays were common and sufficient, but today graphic LCDs (or OLED displays) are increasingly used. There are several libraries for displaying attractive graphics as well as for touch operation. LittlevGL is a library under the liberal MIT license, which can be easily adapted to various displays and controllers. In this article, we demonstrate the whole thing using an ESP32 board and a touch LCD that displays data from a weather station.

Often the easiest way to get acquainted with new technology such as IoT hardware and software is to apply it in a practical way to build something useful; that way learning gets to be fun. In this project the author builds a remotely controlled model for his grandchildren; they get lots of fun out of using the finished product and also helped him build the boat. It uses some empty drinks bottles, a couple of old PC fans and some small controller boards such as the ESP8266 to handle the control functions, set up a Wi-Fi network and even provide an MQTT broker service!

Yes the extremely hot summer is almost over and the September & October 2019 edition of ElektorLabs magazine is now available in the Elektor Store, both in print and digital (pdf) format. Elektor GOLD members have already received the new issue by post.

At last, the new Raspberry Pi 4 hardware has arrived. The last time new hardware arrived the steps forward were modest if not small. From Raspberry Pi 2 to Raspberry Pi 3 was a nice step forward, but from 3 B to 3 B+, to be honest, was more a facelift than a real step. Over time, after the launch of the Raspberry Pi 3 B+, competitors appeared with more powerful and feature-rich hardware like USB 3.0 and native Ethernet, just to name a few improvements.

The M5Stack base module contains an ESP32 board along with a 320 x 240 pixels graphics-capable colour display all packaged in a cute case. I was curious to see how quickly I could build a small network application with it ...

The ESP32 is a very powerful controller, equally at home in entry-level and professional projects. Dogan Ibrahim takes this into account in his book "The Complete ESP32 Projects Guide". We delved a little deeper into his book.

You can use simple LED indicators to show the status of an application you are developing using an IoT board but you can convey so much more information when the dev board has the luxury of a built-in display. Check out this low-cost ESP32 development board with built-in OLED display available now from the Elektor Store.

In my series of articles about My journey into the Cloud I used the ESP32 Pico Kit hardware to send sensor measurement data to various cloud platforms. Using the same platform this review shows how environmental measurements can be made and displayed via openSenseMaps for anyone to view...

It’s almost impossible these days to avoid the ‘Internet of Things’. Amid the tsunami of information it’s sometimes difficult to get a clear overview of the technology. That’s why Jens Nickel ventured out to find his own path to the IoT. His book My Journey into the Cloud covers simple IoT Projects.

Many of the IoT solutions you see at trade shows like Embedded World use Amazon Web Services (AWS). This platform is very powerful, robust and secure and therefore has become a kind of 'industry standard'. Amazon has developed 'AWS IoT Core' specifically for Internet of Things applications. If, like me you just want to try it out you can get a free quota of 500,000 messages for a period of 12 months...