Frequency of Retrieving Data from Website

Question

I have wrote a code that communicate with my website to retrieve data to power on or off a 5V relay. I'm running the code every second to make sure it is real time. Is there more efficient way to tell Arduino to get the data whenever it is changed rather than continuous GET request.

// Send HTTP GET request
  int httpResponseCode = http.GET();
  
  if (httpResponseCode>0) {
    Serial.print("HTTP Response code: ");        Serial.println(httpResponseCode);        String payload = http.getString();
        StaticJsonDocument<2000> doc;             DeserializationError error = deserializeJson(doc, payload);
        if (error) {              Serial.print(F("deserializeJson() failed: "));              Serial.println(error.c_str());              return;            }
        
        String status = doc["status"];
        Serial.println(status);
         if ( status == "ON" ) {
           digitalWrite(ledPin, LOW);
         } else {
           digitalWrite(ledPin, HIGH);
         }
  }

Answer 1

Your two best options would be MQTT and WebSockets.

Both would open a long lived TCP connection that the ESP8266 and browser could use to transmit and receive data. Both would avoid constant polling to see if there's a new command.

MQTT requires an external broker. There are MQTT services with free tiers you could use for this or you could run one locally - Eclipse Mosquitto is a popular MQTT broker that runs nicely on a Raspberry Pi. MQTT is particularly useful for networks with multiple publishers and subscribers (it's a "pubsub" protocol) and is probably overkill if you just have a single device and endpoint.

It's easy to use MQTT from a browser using Javascript. The Paho Javascript MQTT client works well. The ESP8266 would establish a connection to the MQTT broker, subscribe to a topic name and set a callback function that would be called when data was published to that topic. The browser would also establish a connection to the MQTT broker and would publish a message to the topic when responding to events from the user.

WebSockets would allow the ESP8266 and browser to establish a full duplex connection between them. The ESP8266 would create a websocket server which the browser would connect to. The ESP8266 would check for data on the websocket during while running code in loop() and would assemble messages from the browser.

Either works easily if both your devices are on the same network (for instance, at home). If your browser is outside the network, it won't be able to communicate directly with the ESP8266.

MQTT has the advantage that an MQTT server located outside of the network (not one running locally on a Raspberry Pi) would allow the browser and ESP8266 to communicate with one another through it. WebSockets would require the use of a proxy server (there are modules for popular web servers like NGINX and Apache, but this requires control of the web server to configure). If you only ever want to use the browser to control the ESP8266 while they're both on the same network you don't need to worry about this.