How to use Raspberry Pi as data packets collector?

Question

I want to send sensor data from 3 ARM boards over ESP8266 and want to receive it over Raspberry Pi 3 over WiFi or Bluetooth and display it on a webpage using node.js. Is it possible to separate out data collected from different ARM boards on Raspberry Pi.

Answer 1

Doing this over WiFi would be much simpler than Bluetooth, since the ESP8266 does not have Bluetooth capability. You would have a node.js webserver on the Pi listen for requests from the ESP8266.

If each ARM board has a dedicated ESP8266, you could make a web request to the node server from the ESP8266 and read the IP address that made the request, and identify the corresponding ARM board. This info is part of the request and you can access it with:

request.connection.remoteAddress

If you are using a single ESP8266 to connect the three ARM boards, you have a couple of options:

• Modify the request data to indicate which board the request came from
• Add a custom header (you may even be able to use the existing x-forwarded-for header) to the request.
• Change the URL you request.