About Us¶
The ESP Easy project is being handled by the core team of TD-er and Grovkillen. TD-er being the head of backend and Grovkillen being head of the frontend. We both dig down into each others areas of responsible on a daily basis though.
Other than us we have around 100 volunteers that helping us maintain and improve the source code.
History¶
ESP Easy has gone through a lot of changes over the last years and here’s some of the major milestones.
Early days (Nodo Uno)¶
It’s somewhat unknown how it all started but Paul Tonkes (part of the Nodo team) built a IR (infrared) to Kaku controller because he was not happy with the commercial version. That unit came to the world named as Nodo (Uno).
04/2010 (Nodo Due)¶
Taken from the old Nodo website at the time that the Nodo update was introduced (named Nodo Due). During this time, a nice production class Arduino Shield was also built.
10/2011 (Joining the Nodo community)¶
The founder of the ESP Easy project, Mvb, read about the Nodo project and ordered his first Nodo Arduino board from the Nodo shop. He was using it to control Kaku lights around his house.
03/2012 (Nodo Mega)¶
Beta Nodo Mega was released, based on Arduino Mega 2560 board with Ethernet Shield. Using a hosted web application.
05/2013 (Nodo NES Shield)¶
The hardware guys from the Nodo team released a shield for Arduino Mega 2560 that contains everything needed to run Nodo Mega with the web application.
01/2014 (Exploring new wireless capabilities)¶
Nodo got its first 2.4GHz communication plugin, using the well known NRF24L01. This had solved limitations of the 433MHz OOK modules and at the same time it reduced the load on that frequency so Kaku became more reliable.
Mvb decided to run a setup with two Nodo Mega units in the house. First unit runs the NES board for 433MHz communication, second board was dedicated for NRF24L01 communications. Both Mega’s could communicate through I2C or Ethernet.
02/2015 (Entering the Wi-Fi solution)¶
Nodo got its first ESP Wi-Fi plugin, using it as a serial to Wi-Fi bridge. At that time we were using the stock firmware that came with the module.
04/2015 (ESP Connexio)¶
The ESP Connexio project was initiated as the first effort to port the original Nodo code to the ESP platform using early version of the ESP8266 Arduino Core. The team had to workaround a lot of issues but got it working reasonably.
05/2015 (ESP Easy initiative)¶
ESP Easy was initiated, mainly because the Nodo Connexio concept was a bit over complicated. It had the same event list as the original Nodo project. Quite powerful but also complicated to end users. So the idea was to have something plug and play to hook up sensors to Domoticz. That decision of targeting Domoticz is still present in current source code since many plugins from the early days have the values setup in such a way that Domoticz can import them with little effort.
09/2015 (ESP Easy R020)¶
As of R017 the Nodo Plugin mechanism was also implemented within ESP Easy. Some other inconvenient bugs were fixed, help buttons added and it was decided that R020 could be the first production edition.
ESP Easy was launched on Sourceforge as the very first production edition. No programming required.
02/2016 (ESP Easy R078)¶
To make things even more easy, edition R078 was provided as binary images with a simple installer. No need for a complicated Arduino IDE setup. And it also introduced OTA, so subsequent updates could be done without connecting the module to a serial port.
08/2016 (ESP Easy R120)¶
Lots of fixes and additional features:
Rules engine
Custom dummy device
GlobalSync
More commands
More controllers
More devices
Estimated user count was at this time around 7 000.
11/2016 (ESP Easy Mega)¶
ESP Easy Mega was initiated (only for ESP Modules with at least 1MB flash memory). We had to many limitations in ESP Easy, due to the code size that exceeded the 512kB modules flash size. Decided to drop support for these classic modules and went forward with this version.
02/2017 (Change of roles)¶
Psy0rz took over lead development of ESP Easy Mega (2.0.0), he moved the source code onto the GitHub page and started to modularize the code. He also made ESP Easy support multiple controllers and fallback Wi-Fi. During this time nightly releases was introduced and user counts had grown to around 20 000.
08/2018 (New core team)¶
With both Mvb and Psy0rz having little time to spend on the project two of the most eager contributors Grovkillen (mainly wiki documentation and help tools at that time) and TD-er (had already implemented the event based Wi-Fi and scheduler for better timing) stepped in. The aim for the core team is to make the ESP Easy OS as great as can be by dedicating full time commitment to the project.
User count was at this point approximately around 32 000 and 24 hour download count around 280.