It is now possible to connect your mobile devices or PC to the Blinkit Standalone device, when connected it's possible to test the Upvote Blink actions: light and sound, and it's possible to turn ON / OFF the sound notification when newly received Upvotes are being received for the user.

 

Don't want to be bothered by the sound of upvotes?! Turn it off with your phone.

The device is up and running, for about a week now, there where not much moments where i would want to turn off the sound, it stands on my desk and not where i sleep, and its way to much fun to hear it beep happily on newly received upvotes, but for those moments when you do want to mute it, sound can now be turned off and back on with the use of a mobile device.

 

Because most of the intended boards that could be made compatible, do not have convenient ways of changing and testing settings (there are not much onboard buttons, and no touchscreen) and it would therefore be very useful to make possible that a mobile device or PC can connect to the Blinkit Device, to use it for changing settings and testing it's features.

 

Control with your mobile device over WiFi

 

Using the web interface, to test the notification light action

 

 

New Features

This release includes the following new features

• Webserver, makes it possible to locally host a website
• Website where settings and features of the Blinkit device are being presented
• Inform the user how to connect his mobile device over WiFi

 

The website have the following features

• Show Steem user
• Show number of received upvotes for the Steem user
• Button to turn on / off the notification sound
• Button to trigger the notification sound function
• Button to trigger the notification light effect function (Display and LED)
• "Trigger urls", the above functions, presented in the web interface can be triggered by accessing there related urls, this can be used to control the device with simple requests, and used for example with IFTTT or Home automation products and services.

 

 

Other improvements

• Slimmed down the code, and made easy to read comments on the lines involved with this release, basically each is commented because multiple people will be looking into it and improving it / migrate to other boards and to add there work to it for this board.

 

 

Compatible board

This development release is compatible with the inexpansive Arduino, board:

Heltec WiFi Kit 8

Get it on Amazon, Aliexpress, or Banggood for around 10,- usd

 

 

 

 

 

How is it implemented?

When the device boots and does it boot sequence it now also shows on the display the text:

"Connect your phone?
Browse to:
http:// ipaddress "

 

While the device boots, inform the user how to connect a mobile device.

The following code is added to show the text and local ip on the device it's display.

 

The previously added WiFi library for ESP8266 WiFi has a webserver functionality, to configuring the webserver at port 80 and to have a String to store the HTTP request in, the following code is added:

 

The following code starts the webserver and shows the local IP address in the serial monitor:

 

Part of the code that makes the webserver listen for incoming data on the urls:

 

 

Blinkit web interface / website

 

 

Code added to generate the HTML page and its elements:

 

 

Testing

• The device is now in development for around a week / and on for around a week is daily worked with and is kept on overnight, and it is working very well.

• Access the device by it's Hostname is not working yet, tested several approach, reset the WiFi router but not working, using the Hostname, instead of IP would be most useful / user friendly. Anyone have succes with Arduino ESP8266 and successfully setting up the hostname ?

• Beside opening the webinterface from a browser, a mobile app would be nice to have.
  Mobile app testing: To present the web interface full screen on a mobile device as a app, the Blinkit web interface/website is loaded into a Android "webview" class with this Android App, to test how it would function and behave, (the app makes it possible to turn a URL / website into a app with the webview class.) Test results: the web interface works very well, inside webview. And the idea is to soon make a dedicated mobile app for it, it would be most desirable if the Hostname would be available to work with, instead of making a mobile app where the url / ip would need to be typed in.

 

Blinkit web interface inside a webview android app.

 

Picture of the improved prototype when it detects a new upvote / when a new upvote is being triggered with the web interface.

 

The Blinkit Github repository is updated.

Commit: Blinkit standalone v1.1 - webserver, webinterface

The following files where updated

• Readme in the related standalone folderarduinosketch/standalone/heltecwifikit8/arduinosketch_standalone_heltecwifikit8/readme.txt

• INO file that needs to be uploaded to the "Heltec Wifi Kit 8" board.

 

The project can be found and funded on Fundition. and help to buy boards and parts for the team to test, do development work and helps to bring the best possible stand alone Blinkit device and Blinkit software to you and all Steem users.

 

 

Thanks for reading and supporting, if you want to get in contact, or want to help to contribute to the Blinkit project, please feel free to join the Blinkit Discord server More details about Blinkit can be found on the Blinkit website