Looking for a project to work on in my spare time that touches on several technologies, I came across the ESP8266 and had the idea to create a “weather station.” It should be able to track the room climate by storing the current temperature and humidity. Additionally, this collected data should be presented in a nice way.

The project consists of two major parts: The client, which measures the current temperature and humidity and publishes the data via MQTT. It is based on an ESP, and a custom PCB was created for the D1 mini to facilitate the connections. The second part is the server, which stores the received values and presents them in a nice way. There are multiple ways to start a server to handle the data: either with a Node.js-based server, which was specifically created for this project utilizing a SQL database to store the values and starting a web server to present the data in the form of graphs, or with the help of node-red, influxdb, and grafana. Here, a node-red flow is started, which automatically stores the published data to an InfluxDB, and Grafana is used to visualize it.