11

Way Home Meter

TUTORIAL

Use an ESP8266 and some NeoPixels to let loved

ones know when you’ll arrive back home

Way Home Meter

et me know what time you’ll be

home”– it’s a common refrain in

homes across the country. We try

to give good answers, but it’s hard

to know how traffic will affect us on

the way. Rather than rely on guess-

work, let’s try to build something to let our families

know when we’ll make it back.

In this project we’ll build a device that will give

up-to-date home arrival times, based on the live

traffic conditions. To make the device more useful

for when it’s not being used for that purpose, it

works as a clock that automatically fetches its time

from the internet and also automatically adjusts for

daylight savings.

We’ve built this using an ESP8266, which is a

surprisingly powerful microcontroller with built-in

WiFi and can be programmed using the Arduino IDE.

The device makes use of a few different, free

internet services:

• Telegram: an instant messaging service that
  allows for the creation of bots that users
  can interact with. It is a really good way of
  communicating with your ESP8266 or ESP32
  projects from anywhere in the world, for free.


• Google Maps API: can be used to get travel time
  and traffic information between two places.


• NTP servers: Network Time Protocol, a way for
  network-connected devices to get the time. This
  saves the needs for a real-time clock, and also
  doesn’t require the time to be set.

To use it, the person who is coming home uses

Telegram on their phone to share their live location

to a Telegram Bot that is running on the Way Home

Meter. This will update the Way Home Meter

with the person’s GPS coordinates every 20 or

30 seconds.

The Way Home Meter takes these coordinates

and sends a request to the Google Maps API to

get the live travel time and distance between the

person’s location and home.

The Way Home Meter will then add the travel

time onto the current time and display the estimated

arrival time of the person and updates the dial and

NeoPixels to represent what percentage of the

journey (distance wise) has been completed.

CODE IT UP

The code for this project is available on GitHub.

Go to the following URL, hsmag.cc/ybAcHB,

and click the Clone or Download button on the

right side of the page, and then Download Zip.

Brian Lough

Brian is a Maker from

Ireland who primarily

creates projects

and libraries for ESP

microcontrollers. Check

out his stuff on his

YouTube channel and

blough.ie

@witnessmenow

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