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ESPicker | Cryptocurrency Ticker

Track the prices of your favorite coins–Ethereum, Litecoin, Bitcoin, Dogecoin, and others–and display'em on your desk using the ESP8266.

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An easy-to-build, mini-sized, inexpensive tracker for cryptocurrencies. It combines an ESP8266 and an OLED display, using the fantastic WeMos development platform for the ESP8266 SoC. Currently supports: Ethereum (ETH), Litecoin (LTC), Bitcoin (BTC), Bitcoin Cash (BCH).

Why?

With the latest craze in the world of cryptocurrency and, as coin hodlers ourselves, we wanted to have a tiny desktop display cycling through the current prices of different coins. 

Cryptocurrency coins

Although we can certainly find the same information using apps and websites (for free!), we discovered that having a dedicated device on our desks displaying the data constantly minimized the time we spent on tracking it.  Not to mention that building the device is a great excuse to work on a ESP8266-powered, internet-connected, DIY electronics project for any Maker out there! (bro/sis, do you even IoT?)

What?

The main goal is to have a dedicated, inexpensive, device that would help us avoid repeatedly checking websites, apps, email, writing scripts, etc., in order to monitor the ups and downs of coin prices.

In terms of what's required, we challenged ourselves to use the minimum number of parts, and require no special tools/skills such as soldering.

Where?

As we're not the only hodlers out there with a knack for electronic DIY gadgets, we're documenting the parts list and build instructions on this project page for anyone to use.  To make it even easier for those wanting to give the project a try, we'll have a kit available on our site (ACROBOTIC Industries) when we're done with the design.

As with all our projects, the software is free and Open Source!

How?

The hardware

To build a price tracker for cryptocurrency we simply needed two pieces of hardware: an internet-capable microcontroller to gather the data, and a screen to display it, we tried to find the best solution considering ease of use and cost.

OLED display

Given our main goal of having a device with a small form factor that could sit on our desks, the first choice was to use a 0.96" OLED screen to display the price data.

ACROBOTIC 0.96in OLED Graphic Display I2C (SSD1306, 128x64 pixels, Blue/Yellow)

Not only are these displays small (and bright!), but they're very easy to control over i2c merely having to connect 4 wires to our microcontroller or single-board computer: 2 for power and ground, and 2 for the data and clock lines.

ESP8266 microcontroller (SoC)

What can we say about the ESP8266 that hasn't been said about the wheel, sliced bread, or the iPhone... we love it! It's the most convenient, inexpensive way to have a microcontroller running code while connected to a Wi-Fi network.

... Read more »

espicker_case_v1.stl

enclosure prototype (fitting test)

Standard Tesselated Geometry - 2.43 kB - 03/21/2018 at 05:28

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  • Current Status: CAD Modeling

    ACROBOTIC Industries03/21/2018 at 05:40 2 comments

    So we've begun the process of designing a 3d-printable enclosure for the ESPicker. We're using Autodesk's Fusion 360 for the task, as it seems to be a popular option for makers getting started with CAD modeling these days.

    3d CAD model of the enclosure

    We also created the repository for the final version of the ESPicker:

    ESPicker repository

    For now it's just a placeholder, but we'll post all software and hardware files as soon as they're ready for release. In the meantime you're welcome to build your own using our quick-n-dirty prototype version located at https://github.com/acrobotic/Ai_Demos_ESP8266!

  • Porting firmware to the WeMos D1 Mini

    ACROBOTIC Industries03/18/2018 at 20:12 0 comments

    Before working on the firmware to include a nicer UI for the cryptocurrency data, we ported the simple version we have running on the DevKit over to the WeMos D1 Mini, which is our chosen platform for the project.

    WeMos D1 Mini and WeMos OLED Shield
    Porting the code to the WeMos D1 Mini platform!

    As a first pass, we're using the SparkFun Micro OLED library for the smaller-size screen that's mounted on the WeMos OLED Shield.

    We're in the process of writing up the details about the firmware port, so stay tuned and keep an eye on the Project Details section!

  • Proof-of-concept prototype!

    ACROBOTIC Industries03/18/2018 at 08:24 0 comments

    We're finishing up the write up on the first prototype we used for the ESPicker.  For the hardware we used the two components with which we were most familiar: a DevKit board and a 0.96" OLED.  We used the simple test code from our previous Project Log with the addition of barebones (no library) OLED code from our ESP8266 Demos repository.

    And so, now in addition to printing the cryptocurrency price data on our Serial Monitor, we also display the latest price on an OLED screen controlled over I2C.

    Please visit our repository for getting the code:

    https://github.com/acrobotic/Ai_Demos_ESP8266/tree/master/crypto_ticker (simple_oled)

  • Code for Coindesk and Coinmarketcap API's

    ACROBOTIC Industries03/11/2018 at 23:48 0 comments

    We were somewhat surprised about the lack of simple examples for getting cryptocurrency data from free API's. As most people are using either OLED displays or external Apps to display the data, most code samples were highly convoluted. To get us started, we simply wanted a program that would fetch the data, and print it to the Serial Monitor. Because we couldn't find anything out there–without going through commit histories–we decided to post our own:

    And so, we've added to our ESP826 Demos Github repository two minimalistic samples with the code needed to fetch Bitcoin data from Coindesk and Coinmarketcap. The code can be easily modified to fetch any other cryptocurrency available on the APIs, as well as the price data in other currencies (e.g., EUR, GBP).

    To use these programs yYou'll need to install (only) two things:

    • Support for ESP8266 (through the Board Manager or your preferred method)
    • ArduinoJson library (through the Library Manager or your preferred method)

    Please visit our repository for getting the code:

    https://github.com/acrobotic/Ai_Demos_ESP8266/tree/master/crypto_ticker

View all 4 project logs

  • 1
    This is a *rough* draft of the build instructions!

    TO-DO: tidy things up!

  • 2
    Gather the materials
    • ESP8266 Kit
    • OLED

    OR

    • D1 Mini 2-Piece Kit
  • 3
    Set up the hardware

    Wire up

    OR

    Solder

View all 5 instructions

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Discussions

Jasper parker wrote 03/07/2018 at 05:00 point

Im also keen to checkout once guthub is up. 

  Are you sure? yes | no

ACROBOTIC Industries wrote 03/07/2018 at 06:06 point

Sure thing, boss. We appreciate the interest!

  Are you sure? yes | no

openworldittechy wrote 03/06/2018 at 06:39 point

do you have your build on github?

would very much like to play with this as I have all of the components already

  Are you sure? yes | no

ACROBOTIC Industries wrote 03/07/2018 at 04:36 point

Not yet, boss. It'll be up shortly, thanks for checking in!

  Are you sure? yes | no

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