I’ve been playing with Raspberry Pi for a while and recently moved to ESP8266 with Arduino core on it. It gives me a lovely small form factor powerful IoT platform. Using it is very easy through the Arduino IDE.

Current project has been to monitor the water level in a small water feature in the garden, as it loses when the sun is out to evaporation (I know, the one-day-a-year problem of England!). So I used the ESP8266 with a very simple 3-prong water probe (copper strip board) to monitor high and low water levels, then switch a relay to open/close a 12v motorised valve and fill the bowl with water from our rain collection barrel.

I’ll add notification services to it later (it’s setup for OTA updates already).