During my third year in industrial IT, I had a course called “multidisciplinary project 3”, which grouped together several courses such as “English”, “mobile development”, “embedded systems” and “project management”.

To succeed this project I had to come up with an idea and build it, the project had 2 parts: the embedded system where it was mandatory to have a sensor and actuator, the mobile application where it was mandatory to have a user who could see the data and interact with the embedded system. This was the first project I carried out solo.

So, I developed a control temperature system, it works like this: Inside a box the temperature is always read by a sensor. If the temperature differs from the preset setpoint, the microcontroller with a relay activates the heat lamp or the fan until the temperature of the setpoint is reach. The user can with the mobile application control the process. He can start or stop the automatic mode with a button, switch on/off the lamp or the fan and choose a new setpoint for the temperature. On the mobile application the user can find a history of all temperatures entered.

I started the project by making a Gantt chart to manage and setting deadlines for each part of the project and a mind map to understand the system requirements.

The embedded system part used an ESP8266 as microcontroller, a DHT22 as the sensor, a basic lamp and 2 basic fan.

The mobile application used Expo Go with react native and typescript to create my application.

To connect the hardware to the software, I used docker to run MQTT.

The embedded system sends the data to MQTT and the mobile application receives and display it. The mobile application can also send data to the MQTT and the embedded system receives and change a variable.

This project gave me more experience with embedded system, such as understanding how the ESP8266 works and how to make connections between esp8266 wifi and mqtt. I also learned how build a mobile application, establish a connection with MQTT and implement local history.

Overall, the project enabled me to learn and deepen my knowledge and gave me a taste of my future traineeship.