I have been playing with Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and tried to setup ESP32 wireless link to my irrigation system. The both things, ESP32 micro-controller and BLE protocol are new for me so it’s very exiting to test and do experiments. Yesterday evening was fun since I succeeded to establish BLE connection between Raspberry and ESP32. I was so excited that I even recorded a video of this success. 🙂
Happenings in the video:
1. Quick presentation of the GUI
2. Scanning of ESP32 (Raspberry Pi in VNC terminal) => ESP founded as ”mpy-uart”
3. BLE connection to ESP32. => ESP32 blinks three times (long)
=> After the connection ESP32 starts to send dummy notification messages. I’ll be using these notification messages to receive moisture status data from the plants.
4. Writing ”41=enable” to ESP32. => Led turns on. Writing ”42=disable” = Led off
=> I’ll be using write commands for manual irrigation control
5. Disconnect => Led blinks several times fast
I’m using Micropython for ESP32 programming and BLE control examples which I found from the GitHub: micropython/examples/bluetooth/. I have modified the code and added led control for this demo.
Obviously, I could had been using also ESP32 Thonny Micropython terminal and USB-link to demonstrate the BLE connection, but wireless demo is more fun.