Several ESP8266's in 1 Room - 1 Master sending 1 Bit to 5 slaves

Projects Networking, Protocols, and Devices
1

Background
I've been spending considerable time making prototypes for a small, Arduino "candle" that fits inside a mug. A bunch of variations, like some with neopixels, some with straight up LEDs... I'm really into color temperature, lighting, and in general being OCD about trying to make a thing that gives a flicker just like a candle would. I'm doing several spins on this idea.

Idea
One idea is to have maybe 3-5 "candles" throughout the room that light up when you enter the room.

They'd be in mugs or old Yankee jars and completely inconspicuous. But, the PIR motion sensor must be separate...because a PIR sensor sticking out of a coffee mug just totally screams "I'm just a wannabe!" So, a PIR sensor nested below the TV would be great.

Initial implementation idea

  • 1 Master Esp8266 (or NodeMCU 12e (I have tons of those)) w/ PIR sensor
  • 3-5 Slave NodeMCU 12e in jars w/ pixels/leds on top.

The only data to share is 1 bit. Either 1 or 0. Do people exist? Yes or no?

The big question
How should I network these?

  • All ESPs on same wifi network. Master == web server. Slaves send HTTP get to Master.
  • Set up a web server on my home network with a php page.
  • (I don't think 1 ESP AP can handle several clients, so that probably isn't a good option.)

I currently don't have an always-on computer to use, so #2 is currently not very enticing. (But, perhaps that would be a good rationalization for a Raspberry Pi)

Future Considerations
More than one bit. I can, later on, program these to serve as notifications. Like, if it's going to rain today, make the one on the Walnut shelf light up blue.

Do you have any particular advice?

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Note: After some analysis and testing, I am fairly certain I'll go with a Raspberry Pi LAMP machine on my local intranet.

I set up a test php page on a www server, and was able to set and retrieve values nicely. But, since I'm not much of a LAMP guy, it would probably be very good to keep my database stuff local and detached from my real websites that I actually care about.

3

A couple more thoughts.

  1. my web server code is fairly simple and can be file based. So perhaps all connected to the same network, and one ESP serves the php.

  2. maybe this is a good use for nRFL24L01s.

4

So perhaps all connected to the same network, and one ESP serves the php.

This tells me that you do not understand what PHP is, and what it does.

PHP is NOT served up. It is EXECUTED on the server, to affect what is served up.

5

I used the wrong term. I do understand how pho works at this level at least (that it's server side code, not a simple static file). The point is that one node would act as a server and handle it.

However I am now realizing I'm making a ridiculously false assumption. That's that one of these devices can even execute php code.

So I suppose that logic then would be more in the Arduino sketch to process the query string and handle the file bit storage.

At my real job we use .NET, so I might as well have said to execute an aspx page, which would have been equally as absurd since (to my knowledge) these things don't have the .NET framework on them....

6

I'm a moron.

I'm doing all of this to avoid having to sanitize data on my website. Sanitizing values that can only be 0 and 1 is surely the simplest type of input sanitation that exists.

So, I'm going the online route, which makes things much easier.