I made my indoor plant a soil moisture meter which reports the values to Azure cloud. However, I had some trouble making my D1 mini board to sleep and wake up reliably. Turns out, just calling the deep-sleep function once doesn't do the trick. I had to deep-sleep for several shorter cycles before reporting the measurement. Check out the article for a brief how-to.
For a long time I've wanted to get more into embedded stuff and closer to the physical world when it comes to computers. As a kid I was quite interested in electronics and tweaked some small stuff, but I never really got into programming anything. Now with the market full of cheap Arduino-compatible chips, I decided to hook myself up into the Internet of Things and make a WiFi-operated garage door opener. Check out the article for an overview of the project.
