ESPEasy current problems and ideas

[doxikus]

Hi All,

First of all, thanks to author/s for this great piece of software, in near feature I'm planing to switch my home automation completely to domoticz, for now I use on different places around my house different solutions .

I have done many tests with different boards and right now I think that ESP is best solution, in DIY world.

So few days ago I try to load espeasy fw on my test nodemcu dev board (12E) and got some errors. First I can't get any data from my DS18B20 and DHT11 sensors, pin is right, power source etc. After I add device under devices tab if I click on edit I got empty page, If I try to add new sensor everything works ok, but when I click on save I got empty page, after clicking back new device, sensor is listed but I cannot edit. Also I have domoticz running on synology, I create virtual sensors, got some data in log but I think problem is at my ESP so I need to first resolve this previous mentioned issues.

Reason for my so long post is question does somebody encounter in this issues!? Also can someone explain what formula means in device additional settings.

• Adding devices and later editing don't work.

• sensor reading is 0

Later I will try to load FW on my another ESP board and try again.

Thanks

[Martinus]

I guess you are using an old ESP board manager package. Current ESP Easy R20 release will cause memory issues on that version.
See this topic.
http://www.esp8266.nu/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=77

Wiki has been updated:
http://www.esp8266.nu/index.php/Tutoria ... are_Upload

[doxikus]

HI,

Thanks for update, I have update arduino IDE board manager and flash my ESP8266 again . Now everything works like a charm . So right now I have tested with DHT11 and DS18B20 sensors, works fine and stabile. Domoticz is installed on synology server. So next thing as someone asked on this form is it posible to havee two or more DS18B20 sensors on board!?.

Also I have made some changes on interface and create new skin, maybe you are interested to implement on feature release, I can help with this, work is related to changing markup and load external CSS. Size of html document is same as original but CSS is additional 57kb Size can be reduced deleting unnecessary rules.

So here is my idea

image.png (54.53 KiB) Viewed 9124 times

[rtenklooster]

Screenshot looks good

[Martinus]

So next thing as someone asked on this form is it posible to havee two or more DS18B20 sensors on board!?.

This is available with R22.

Also I have made some changes on interface and create new skin, maybe you are interested to implement on feature release, I can help with this, work is related to changing markup and load external CSS. Size of html document is same as original but CSS is additional 57kb Size can be reduced deleting unnecessary rules.

Thanks for pointing out that our current "skin" is looking rather old fashioned and needs a make-over. Nice sample you made, will try to make something similar as a tryout for R23.

Current html structure is a left over from quick and dirty prototyping using a lot of copy & paste (so also copying errors and stuff)...
Now may be a good time to focus a bit on look and feel, although we would rather focus on adding plugins.

First step taken is to move all styling attributes to the inline style section and also have a link to an optional "esp.css" on SPIFFS. I would prefer to have the css file stored on the ESP, so it will not depend on some other server device.

SPIFFS is rather limited on ESP-01 so we need a tiny css file.

With some cleanup of the code and a small (600 bytes) css file, I managed to get it looking like this:

ESPEasy.png (33.34 KiB) Viewed 9086 times

I'm not an expert on CSS and anything beyond old school html so there will be much room for improvement. But we have to keep the code and filesize small or we will run out of specs on the ESP-01

[doxikus]

Hi Martinus,

I saw R22 update, I will test it soon.

I need to make introduction under appropriate topic. I currently working in one local web development company as frontend developer, so I have few years of working experience on web projects, desktop and mobile, HTML, CSS, JS.

For skin updated, It is just idea . If you want I can take this task on me. I can make some css magic and clean markup and define some styles for feature use.

In my example I use quick and dirty approach, some sort of mini css framework. We can create standalone CSS like on R22 and use it in feature. Also we need to cover mobile and desktop user, so maybe to think in mobile first approach.

Also I would like to make note here, I have previously work on few IOT projects which involve ARM devices and all them have same problem, lack of free space . It is different from classic web development for desktop users where you can attach js framework and add some cool effects . So it is a challenge for me on professional level and I want to try this out.

Right now I can post few ideas and send my code or I can join on github, create new, beta, branch where I can commit my code changes.

Thanks

[Martinus]

Thanks for your interest in contributing to our project, more specifically the web interface. My focus has always been on supporting hardware devices and the web interface is merely there to make configuration changes in an easy way. (we started out on serial port with this project...)

The current web interface could use some attention. Having that said, we immediatly face a rather difficult challenge on the first generation of ESP boards:

Code: Select all

Sketch uses 408,860 bytes (94%) of program storage space. Maximum is 434,160 bytes.

The 94% ... And I would like to reserve what's left for adding device plugins... And we have to keep in mind that the ESP Easy was launched as a user friendly multi-sensor device to be used in combination with Home Automation controllers, so it's primary task is not being a webserver

But I'm still interested to see your changes in the HTML markup language. It would be nice if we could improve things without adding a lot of code to the system. On the CSS part, we have more room, although the 512kB flash modules have only 64kB SPIFFS and we use approx 32kB for system configuration.

[doxikus]

HI,

Did you consider option to have some sort "builder" so we can reduce size of complete sketch. For example, someone would like to use only temp sensor they don't need to control relays, LCD, etc... Only to have core system and then have build option, include what you need to use.

[maluko]

HI,

Did you consider option to have some sort "builder" so we can reduce size of complete sketch. For example, someone would like to use only temp sensor they don't need to control relays, LCD, etc... Only to have core system and then have build option, include what you need to use.

Not bad idea, like sensor plugins...

[asm7100]

Some thing like this.?

http://frightanic.com/nodemcu-custom-build/

I don't know how to do it

[Martinus]

HI,

Did you consider option to have some sort "builder" so we can reduce size of complete sketch. For example, someone would like to use only temp sensor they don't need to control relays, LCD, etc... Only to have core system and then have build option, include what you need to use.

Reducing sensors will not contribute that much to the issue. All plugins together use only 11 kB. The latest staging release with spiffs included needs 447 kB. So even if we exclude all plugins it would still need 435 kB and exceeds the maximum of 434 kB limit on 512kB ESP Modules.

Recent developments on the ESP package in combination with using SPIFFS is the bigger issue here. Most of the program space is utilized by Expressif SDK + ESP Core Package + libraries. Even running a basic webserver sample sketch on package 1106 already eats 350 kB away of the 434 available.

But I'm working on a release that uses an alternate approach to save the configuration settings using the same area that SPIFFS would use. So we can skip both the EEPROM emulation and spiffs for the short term. This saves both on RAM as well as program space. This version currently compiles to 414 kB with the latest staging package so I expect it to run also with the next stable ESP package when it becomes available.