“This Instructable is competing on contests: “Remote Control”, and “Arduino”, If you like it, please give your vote by clicking at the above banner. Thanks a lot! ;-)The great majority of my work on IoT arena was using NodeMCU and more recently, the ESP32. But, I think important not forget my early steps, a couple of years ago where I start learning IoT using an Arduino UNO and the old and good ESP8266-01.
So, I decide here to return to that time (with a little bit more of experience now) and explore again those great devices, connecting them to the cloud, using the ThingSpeak.com web service. We will also explore to control things remotely, be using an Android App developed using the MIT AppInventor.
The “Center of our IoT project” will be the ThingSpeak.com. The local unit (UNO/ESP-01) will capture data from sensors and actuator status, send them to the Internet, “writing” on a specific ThingSpeak.com Status Channel. The local unit will also receive data from the internet, “reading” them from specific ThingSpeak Actuator Channels.
An Android App will be also be reading those data from the ThingSpeak.com Status Channel and displaying them for the user. Same way, the user, based on that status info, can send commands to actuators, writing them on ThingSpeak Actuator Channels (See the above Block diagram to better understand the flow of data).”