Traffic controller project

Hi guys and gals, I’m working on a traffic controller project for a scaled autonomous project and I’m not sure whether will work with Blynk so I appreciate it if I can get some insight.

Device: ESP8266/32 or MKR1000 similar board (I’m not defined to a particular board and open to suggestion but it need to be easy enough to code as I’m still learning.)

objective:

  1. pause the light with a switch button.
  2. switch the state of the lights red to green and vise verse.
  3. Sync the lights up together so it can be controlled simultaneously. i.e be able to switch the state of the more than one light simultaneously

I’m at the planning stage so I do not have any code as such but hope that it will work so I can get the ball rolling.

Many thanks in advanced

It sounds very so-able.
I’d go for a NodeMCU board (or possibly multiple boards, depending on the scale of your project).

I believe our friend @Lichtsignaal does some model train signalling projects using Blynk and may have some videos or descriptions of projects that might steer you in the right direction.

However, if you’ve come to the forum looking for code examples then you’re probably not going to get what you’re looking for. If you’re new to coding (or to coding with Blynk) then the Sketch Builder examples are a great starting point.

Pete.

@PeteKnight : Thanks for your reply, I was after guidance to be sure that it was possible with Blynk. It seems like Pavel is working on a feature to control multiple devices via a single Blynk project.([Waiting on Pavel] Eventor multiple devices)

Until then I’ll make the single traffic light work and then incorporate extra lights at a later stage when it is avaliable

The Eventor across multiple devices development isn’t on the roadmap, so I’m not sure about it’s status. I use iOS, which doesn’t have the basic Eventor available, so its not something I’ve ever used.

If you want to control multiple devices then it’s fairly easy anyway - just add the multiple devices to your project and use them that way. Alternatively you could share the same auth code across multiple devices, but that isn’t the best way to go.

Another option is to use multiple Bridge widgets, or even look at using MQTT as a communication protocol between devices.

Pete.

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… together with node-red which was my first thought after reading the title and some first sentences of this topic. Node-red is a great platform (tool?) for central management of connected nodes. AND it cooperates nicely with Blynk as an user interface.

Agreed that Node-Red running on a Raspberry Pi is ultimately the best solution, but it’s also possible to run a small MQTT server on an ESP8266 with a handful of remote clients. It may take a bit more coding on the ESP that’s acting as the MQTT server to get the Blynk integration working though.

Pete.

Similar multiple devices doesn’t require Eventor. They are easily managed with Device Selector Widget or Device Tiles.