The Vertical Axis Wind Turbine project is a project team that I joined as part of the student organization Engineers for a Sustainable World. We on the software team are working with an ESP8266 microcontroller and several different sensors including an anemometer, a wind direction sensor, a temperature sensor, a rotary encoder, and a servo motor. We wrote our software using Arduino IDE and MATLAB (for some mathematical calculations), and ThingSpeak to upload data from the sensors to the cloud.
In order to integrate the different sensors and write the appropriate code, we worked with members of the electrical team. We used their interconnect diagrams to connect the sensors to the correct GPIO pins and write the appropriate software for the different communication protocols used to communicate with sensors. For example, we are using the Modbus protocol to communicate with some of our sensors, which is a protocol that has its origins in industrial machinery, but is also useful for IoT.