Background
Block Programming (or visual programming) is the new and emerging but a very powerful paradigm of programmings. MIT App Inventor is a Block programming platform to create apps for android operating system.
MIT App Inventor project was initially developed jointly by MIT and Google. The idea of App Inventor platform stems from a research led by Dr. Hal Abelson, who is a well-known Computer Scientist from MIT-CSAIL. Dr. Abelson worked under Dr. Seymour Papert at MIT. The App Inventor Platform was outcome of Education philosophy conceptualized by Dr. Papert known as “Constructionism“.
IoT Home Automation is an upcoming and very intriguing phenomenon. You have the ability to control any appliances in your Home using a single click on any of your web-enabled device. Internet is used for communication between the appliance and your device. The Home Automation is one of the quite simple yet exciting apps I had created using the MIT App Inventor Platform.
Technical Description
The project is based on the NodeMCU hardware IoT platform, which has on-board ESP8266 Wifi chip. The app uses simple HTTP protocol to communicate with the NodeMCU board, which is hooked to a relay board. After clicking on a designated button in the app, the app sends specific HTTP requests to the NodeMCU. NodeMCU reads those requests and takes appropriate action i.e. controls an appliance as desired. If required by the program, NodeMCU can also send specific replies to the Android App. The phone running the app needs to be connected to the same network as of the NodeMCU board, if not using port forwarding. There is a textbox in the app in which the user can specify the local IP address of the NodeMCU board. After implementing port forwarding on router, the same app can be used for an internet connected application which can control appliances from anywhere.
App Files
(Coming soon…)