Single click email from ESP-01

Sailing through for a Single Click e­mailer

Don’t you just hate it when you are stuck with a square-­one situation for an irritating problem that you needed a solution for like, yesterday?! For more technical information, visit us at www.avench.com

For a struggling embedded systems start­-up like ours, we certainly wouldn’t enjoy being in the dark, with a glitch that we couldn’t break. Deadlines, man hours, estimates and expenses, quotes and re-quotes, everything seems so oblivious to this tiny glitch we have at our hands, staring down at us with the rudest of grins. Boy, we sure are warriors more than businessmen! You can obviously see why one single problem could feel like a war for a start-­up, formed by solely the vision and desire of some handful of pure engineers, who later on strive hard to realize their vision as once they foresee, with every door that opens for us.

It all started when we jumped to design an embedded system for sending an e-mail on pressing a button. We chose ESP01 module, as it was the basic and cheaper version in the ESP series which currently done up to ESP12. Even though the faintly small sized RAM seemed like it would cause trouble, we went along with the idea of a cheaper product.

For obvious security reasons, we needed to have an SSL in place which of course comes with a huge library, certifiably big for our choice of the module. And to pour oil to the hot frying pan, none of the SMTP servers would support port 25, which is, interestingly enough, a non­SSL port. Reluctant to take a U­turn after everything we’ve been through for this product, we decided not to give up on searching for a solution and find some middle ground.

So, there we were, going through a ton of keywords and Google results, modified and restated queries, researching away for a glimpse of an idea to redeem ourselves from the problem. That is when we came across the website called ‘smtp2go’, which helps send e­-mails without having to install an SSL or the library, if we sign up with our mail id and create an account with them. All we have to do is, set up the system to send mails with a combination credential of our e-mail id and the encrypted password the site would provide us!

Then it didn’t take much time to rig up a circuit that sends mails at the press of a button, with GPIOs, a button, an LED and an Interrupt.

What we are left with now, is an enormously cost effective, small sized, embedded solution for all of our problems that hindered us from the go, of product design, which has applications those happen to be wide ranging possibilities in industrial automation, hardware design services, product design engineering etc., that in the imminent future would lead to a crop of wearable smart systems and hybrid IoTs.

Even though in the complex world of electronics, embedded electronics and microcontrollers, some major crisis would always make us want to pluck our heads out, but this particular one made us go back to school, restart with fresh eyes, and viola! There was the solution!

And, that was what it made this story worth telling. The ones that will really test our nerves, and the amount of satisfaction we get when we tackle them down!