You always wanted a smartphone-controlled door lock because the tech world is here to shove them in your face,
Today I got my ESP8266 DEV Board… It’s a PCB from Olimex with an onboard relay and a 5V->3.3 voltage regulator,

In this project I’ll use a standalone web server to create an iPhone remote for my gate

Where to buy?

You can find this tiny board from Olimex’s web store for the astonishing price of 9 euros,

Let’s install NodeMCU!

Now you simply have to power on the board keeping the button pressed and then click “Flash”, the software will do all the hard work for you:

It’s time to code!

Now we should load our code using ESPlorer; it’s an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for ESP8266 developers, downlod it from here (Warning! This requires java!) and launch the program

 

Select the baudrate (should be 9600) and press Connect,  then select the “NodeMCU+MicroPyton” section and load the code you can find here: WebServer Code – PasteBin

Save this file as init.lua and upload it! On the right side the device will print the gained IP and you can toggle the realy using that URL

Now you can develop your own application using this stupid example, I wrote a simple HTML/PHP application to remotely open the gate using an iPhone, connecting the realy to the Open switch: