IoT is generating data and to quicky look at it during the prototype phase is sounds good to plot these data in a dashboard. There are many solution you can install on your server and configure to get pretty nice dashboard. But if you want to go faster it would be really nice to have a SaaS solution for doing this. I have tested some of the solution I have found and friends helped me to found (not easy to search on google …). This post details these experiments
Author Archives: Paul
Extend TD1204 Standard firmware to simplify GPS
The TD1204 modem firmware is a easy to use solution for sending message to Sigfox network. It starts to be complex when you want to create your own message including the GPS position. The standard firmware returns the satellite NMEA frames in text mode and you have to process it.
To make it simple I built a modification of the standard modem firmware to add an extra command to enrich a message with a GPS coordinate automatically.
Holapex – getting your first hologram at home
Did you dream about getting an hologram going out from your cell-phone, this is not sci-fi but a reality for less than 15$. Holapex has raised 3500$ on kickstarter to provide a kit for doing this and it has been delivered during the last days all over the world.
First step in LoRa land – microchip RN2483 test
After spending some time reading and writing about LoRa it was a good time to make some real test of this technology.
As actually there is no network for LoRa, as much as I know, in my town, I expected to start a simple LoRa test (point to point and not as part of a WAN). I just bought some RN2483 LoRa module from Microchip online and also get some from Avnet (thank you Guillaume)
The module is easy to solder on a prototype board and get its command over a serial port. I choose to make two modules :
- The first one is connected to a FTDI cable and will stay at home as a basestation
- The second one is connected to an Arduino and will be a mobile device for my test
What is LoRa ?
LoRa is a dedicated network for Internet Of Things and Machine2Machine communications. It is actually the main competitor against SigFox.
As LoRa is actually rising in France with different announce from 2 of the main cellular operators deploying the network, it is a good time to have a post on what it is, how it works and what differs compared with SigFox.
Silabs EFM8 a low cost microcontroller based on 8051 core
If you my blog and the lesson section you may notice my interest for 80×51 micro-controller family. Silicon Labs has recently launch a new 8b family based on this core.
With price less than 1 euros, they are interesting candidates for low cost hacking and hardware design. Even the programming cable is not really expensive ( $35 + port + Tax ) and the development environment is free.
EFM8 provides a 50MHz core with all the usual I/O – Serial, I2C, SPI. Plus 12 bit ADC, voltage regulator, oscillator…
Telecom Design SDK decode GPS frame
The Telecom Design SDK contains a function to encode GPS coordinates : TD_SENSOR_EncodePositionXY this function from the SDK allow to choose the size of the GPS encoded data and to reduce it. This post explains how this function works and gives a php implementation to decode it.
WordPress revolution slider – start an animate on scroll
The revolution slider is a way to animate a web page based on a wordpress plugin. When you create a slider it start to be animated directly when the page is loaded. So if your slider is on top of the page it is perfect but if your animation is on the middle / bottom, the animate will be finished when the user will scroll to that part.
It is possible to custom the javascript part and fix this problem as described in this post.



