LG Air Conditioner Controlled by ESP8266 / NodeMCU Board

The story behind this project

Some summer nights are quite hot, and although I have air conditioning in my room, I can not leave it on all night ... or I wake up in the morning with a sore throat!

So what if I scheduled the air conditioner to work 10-15 minutes every hour for a while? But how, if the remote control of the device only allows one on/off programming?

Earlier this year, I started researching the Internet of Things (IoT) and discovered Arduino and other development boards such as nodeMCU / ESP8266 and then decided to start with a project that would allow me to schedule the air conditioner as I intended.

But I wanted the scheduling not to be hard-coded on the development board and would be easy to change, in less than 1 minute I could change the settings at my will.

So I decided to use my smartphone as the interface for the development board scheduling ... and this is what I used

Using the MIT App Inventor 2 , I created an app that defines the length of time the air conditioner would work and the duration of it.

Step 1: Nodemcu + IR Transmitter

You can buy this infrared emitters on Ebay or AliExpress for less than 1€.

Connect the sensor as shown and upload the code to the nodemcu board

Step 2: Creating the App @ MIT App Inventor 2

Just import the .aia file to the App Inventor site

Step 3: Enjoy

This is my first instructable and I assume that anyone reading this knows how to use the Arduino IDE to program the board and is already registered in MIT App Inventor 2