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So how did we end up here?

Posted: 26 Aug 2015, 14:06
by Martinus
Hello to you all out there...

My name is Martinus and I started to play with microcomputers and solid state relays back in the 90ths, running wires through my house. But the wiring soon became too much of a struggle and the project was abandoned.

More than a decade later when my wife wanted to have the option to remotely switch the outside Christmas tree lights, I purchased a simple CoCo (Click On/Clock Off) wireless 433MHz device. Soon to be followed by more of those. Searching for a way to automate the switching of several CoCo lights, I discovered the Dutch Nodo project and the old hobby got into a restart. Running several Nodo units at the moment for more than a few years now.

But then the ESP8266 arrived and i started to use these new gadgets to have Nodo units communicate between each other. Soon after that, it became clear that the ESP8266 could be used for a lot more than just a serial to Wi-Fi bridge. I discovered the ESP for Arduino project and started to port the original Nodo source code to the ESP platform. After some initial struggle, the "ESP Connexio" project was brought to life. At the same time I switched from the old Nodo Mega to Domoticz, another popular Home Automation project.

Together with some guys from the Nodo project, we decided to launch a new ESP initiative because we discovered it's potential and working with the ESP as being "the new kid on the IoT block" was just a lot of fun.

The ESP Connexio inherited the "eventlist" driven approach from the Nodo and for many Nodo users this has always been a hurdle to get things going. So we also started working on a much easier concept by the name of ESP Easy where all things should be web based and more user friendly.

Although the ESP Easy is still in it's experimental stage, we decided last week to launch the wiki and our forum and started spreading the word.

So that's how we got here :D

You are encouraged to join us...