Part of Ross Dalziel and FACT’s Cloudmaker project, for this we developed some code and instructions for simple workshops to introduce children to the Internet of Things.

Building on the work we did in an earlier phase of Cloudmaker, we used the cheap ESP8266 WiFi microcontroller boards to make it easy to hook up a temperature sensor to a selection of cloud services.

One was a basic Python Flask server, which we wrote as part of the work, to allow workshops to be run without access to the wider Internet.

A second pushed the data into the ThingSpeak IoT data platform for longer-term storage and analysis.

And the third connected to a Minecraft server, where it drew a bar graph at a predefined location to tie a point in both the virtual world of Minecraft and the real world together.