ESPer - Space Automation Firmware for ESP8266

ESPer is a firmware for ESP8266 based IoT systems. IT provides a common platform for all kind of devices and establishes a common communication interface.

ESPer uses allows to implement firmware for classes of devices and let each of the device expose device-specific features. The features expose their current status and their controllable functions over a unified mqtt interface and allows easy integration in home-automation controllers. For easy management, devices publish current status information and can be updated over the WiFi interface.

Requirements

For build, ESPer requires Sming to be installed.

During runtime, a 2.4GHz WiFi Network with WPA or WPA2 encryption is required. It is highly recommended to use a separated network for ESPer based devices to limit the broadcast and multicast traffic. In addition, a MQTT server is required.

Depending on the features used, some services must be provided in the environment during runtime:

• For OTA Updates, a Web-Server capable of serving files via HTTP is required.
• For Heartbeat, a timer service must be used to send the heartbeat messages.

Getting Started

Install esp-open-sdk and Sming

See their README for further details.

Clone the ESPer Repository

git clone https://git.maglab.space/esper/esper.git

Create a site directory

Create a directory beside the ESPer repository. Then copy Configuration.mx.example to Configuration.mk and change according to the target environment.

Create a device implementation

Inside the the site-directory create a subdirectory called devices/mydev and add your device specific code here. The code must implement a function Device* createDevice() which returns a device instance.

Build the firmware

Execute the makefile in the ESPer directory while specifying the site directory:

make SITE=path/to/site

Flash the firmware

Boot the ESP into the flash mode and execute the following command:

make SITE=path/to/site mydev/flash