ESP8266 Community Forum

- Sun May 26, 2019 2:10 pm #82488 Hi,

I am not quite sure which board this question belongs to: Is it possible to share a folder of my laptop with the ESP8266? I would like the ESP to write sensor data straight to my laptop, over the wireless network at home.

Thanks,
Dan

- Sun May 26, 2019 6:05 pm #82491 No, that would be almost impossible - you'd ned to implement a network file system protocol of some sort and that wouldn't fit in the limited memory available.

The best approach would be to set up a server application on your laptop that does the actual writing and then have the ESP connect to the server via the network.

You could build a pretty simple REST API and publish it via an Apache web server, or the standard python web server, or via node.js. Then you could use a web client in the ESP to connect and publish the data.

Alternatively you could use MQTT and connect to a broker somewhere (on your laptop or out on the Internet), and then create an MQTT client on your laptop to receive the messages - then you would have some sort of message persistence when the laptop was not connected.

- Mon May 27, 2019 2:33 am #82496 with minimal effort:
run ftp server on PC, simple ftp client on esp.
ftp allows for creation of new file or append to existing.

- Mon May 27, 2019 7:35 am #82503 Thanks to to both you, for taking time to answer my question!

@davydnorris: I am afraid the first part of your answer exceeds my level of understanding. For the second part: I did successfully use thingspeak in the past, which allows me to receive data on my laptop. But I hoped that there is an easier way of doing it, without the need of a third party service. As your answer seems to suggest that my laptop may serve as as broker, I need to further investigate that solution.

@schufti: 'ftp' may be the keyword I was missing when searching on the web. I see that there are projects that use ftp. This is quite new to me, so I am not yet able to judge whether it suits my needs.

Thanks again and kind regards
Dan