ESP32 (31) – BLE, GAP

In my previous tutorials you learned how to use the wifi interface of the esp32 chip. Starting from this post, I’m going to explain you the second wireless technology the esp32 chip supports: bluetooth. In particular, my tutorial will be about Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), sometimes called also Bluetooth 4.0 or Bluetooth Smart: Bluetooth Low Energy BLE is a technology…

ESP32 (28) – MQTT and SSL

Security is a very important aspect for MQTT brokers. In a previous article you’ve already learned how to implement authentication and authorization. The weakness in that configuration was that credentials were transmitted in cleartext; it was therefore possible, for an attacker who can sniff the network traffic, to read and use them to impersonate a legitimate client. Today I’ll show…

ESP32 (26) – UART

UART (Universal Asynchronous Receiver-Transmitter) is an hardware peripheral which allows serial, asynchronous communication with configurable data format and speed. The UART interface usually works at logic level: the electric signals are generated by an external circuit, following the standards of the communication bus you chose. For example the classical “serial port” of many personal computers is based…

ESP32 (25) – Oled display with U8G2

If you read my post ESP32, Wemos or not to Wemos you know that I brought a development board, that happened to be a D-duino-32 clone, with an ESP-WROOM-32 module and a 0.96″ oled display. This display, available also as a standalone module on several websites (for example on Banggood), has the following features: [checklist] size: 0.96 inches resolution: 128×64 pixels controller: SSD1306 with I2C interface power supply: 3.3V – 6V…

A Certificate Authority with OpenSSL

The security of several protocols is implemented using SSL certificates. Usually, those certificates are created by public certificate authorities. If we’re connecting to a website (HTTPS protocol), the browser we’re using must recognize the identity of the CA that signed the server certificate, otherwise an error message is shown: A CA “creates” a new certificate signing it…