Mechanical engineer and internet developer João Santos is bringing again the pager, after a vogue, with a custom-built web-linked Arduino-based textual content messaging system — combining an Espressif ESP8266 for Wi-Fi connectivity with an Arduino UNO appropriate main microcontroller.

“The aim of this venture is to permit the consumer to ship quick textual content messages that can then be acquired on a Wi-Fi [Espressif] ESP8266 [microcontroller], and displayed on an Arduino with an LCD display,” Santos explains of the venture, which was impressed by traditional POCSAG-style paging methods with a contemporary internet twist.

“The online software was developed in OutSystems, [as] not solely am I very aware of this improvement platform, but additionally as a result of it gives a fast and free method of creating and deploying not solely the principle UI but additionally a database, backend, and a fast solution to join safely to my public IP with out having to reveal it.”

The online aspect of the appliance is easy sufficient: a touchdown web page presents the consumer two fields, one for the sender’s title and one for a plain-text message of as much as 160 characters in size. “I added a safeguard on the backend that it solely permits sending a message if none was despatched for a sure period of time,” Santos provides. “I might, and doubtless ought to, have applied some form of captcha, however that was already going a bit out of scope for what I wished to do.”

The receiving unit is made up of two microcontroller improvement boards, one with a Microchip ATmega328P and the opposite with an Espressif ESP8266. The rationale for 2 boards: an unlucky expertise attempting to run the whole lot from the ESP8266, housed on a clone of a WEMOS Lolin D1.

“I quickly found it is a very completely different improvement board than the Arduino UNO,” Santos explains, “and simply getting the Arduino IDE compiling for it was a ache! That’s a part of the rationale I made a decision on retaining the display related to the Arduino Uno, the {hardware} was already setup, and it could be simpler to maintain issues separated.”

The ESP8266, then, handles community connectivity over a Wi-Fi connection, sending acquired messages to an Arduino UNO appropriate over I2C for formatting and show on an LCD1602 character-based show. Two buttons permit messages to be scrolled, utilizing a resistor ladder to affix each a single analog enter, whereas a buzzer sounds an alarm each time a brand new message arrives.

“What I realized: do not buy low-cost unsupported improvement boards, this venture would have been method simpler with an Arduino [Nano] 33 IoT and a I2C LCD display,” Santos notes within the full venture write up, accessible on Medium.