MSRaynsford

I made this hourglass prop for world book day for a Discworld death costume. It's mostly made from 6mm ply but the 'glass' sections are made from 2l fizzy bottles and the 'sand' is rice died blue. It's a little bit sticky because the centre hole is a little bit small but that's actually quite good that someones entire 'life' doesn't pass from the top section to the bottom section instantly. Hazel decided to go to school dressed as Little Lou and the Woolly Mammoth. All I had to do was make a sew a pocket onto her dress, my wife had the clever inspiration to make the Woolly Mammoth from a knitted poncho and a dozen elastic bands.

In Part 1 of the Wifi configuration tutorial  we learned how to set up the device to read/write from non volatile areas of memory so that we can recall a new wifi ssid and password between reboots. In Part 2 we're going to provide an interface that allows you to set the new values from a web page. This tutorial is a combination of all the previous parts so I'll include links to the relevant parts rather than run through it all again. The one part we missed from the last tutorial was actually creating a wifi network. We need to include the ESP8266Wifi library and open up a new access point.  Do this after loading the new wifi values to ensure the network has the correct name. The next step is to set up a webserver to provide pages to the user. We're going to create a default index page that's just simple text. For the tutorial this will serve to point the user in the right direction for the admin functions but in a full program this would be whichever page you ...

By request I made a stencil as large as possible. This 600x900 sheet of mylar filled my entire bed and took a whole 2 hours to cut the fine detail out of. I believe it's going to be used to apply a pattern to fabric for a cosplay outfit.

So far with the ESP8266 modules we've been using the same network name and password, these values have been hard coded into the program for ease of use. Now imagine that we had a dozen devices all running at the same time, all trying to set up the same wifi network (and yes I realise by using the mac address as part of our SSID we have avoided this problem). The solution, that we're going to talk about today, is to allow the user to configure the network name and password. This is simply good practice as anyone who has logged into a device using 'admin' and 'password' should realise. The first step is to find a way to store the new values in a way that they will be remembered while the device is turned off, and then be able to load that information when the device turns back on again. On a standard Arduino we'd use the EEPROM which would allow us to write data to a specific type of memory that requires special electrical conditions to be programm...