I’m working on a GPS tracker business based on sigfox techology. Here is my Pitch made for a local startup contest where I got a prize.
My last pitch about sigfox GPS tracker
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Author Archives: Paul
Some GNSS / GPS stuff that are good to know for IoT
When you start developing a GPS solution, you have to deal with energy and for this you have to create a strategy based on what you expect and the size of your battery.
Basically, a GPS is consuming about 25mA when running. An active antenna will consume about 10mA more. The first time you start it, it have to sync with the satellites, get the ephemeris then you can position in 2D then in 3D.
Read more for more information
IoT conference at @lavajug
Yesterday I made a conferences about Internet Of Things main technologies with live demonstration. Watch it on Youtube !
Telecom Design TD1204 / TD1208 use DB2-DB3
Telecom Design TD1204 have really limited number of GPIOs available even if it have many pins 🙁 … So you quickly have to use the DB2-DB3 pin that are usually used by SWD port.
If you try to reconfigure directly the Pin, this will not work until you inactivate SWD. For this, you must call first the following functions :
GPIO_DbgSWDIOEnable(false); GPIO_DbgSWDClkEnable(false);
…
EFM32 – I2C for Telecom Design TD1204 / TD1208
A good way to expand Telecom Design system is to use I2C to connect external devices. As an example I had to add an extra Analog to Digital converter. I’m using a MCP3021Ax device. This I2C chip just return a 10bits value each time you send a READ at the expected address. This post contains the TD1204 code to configure I2C and get the data back
SigFox – The Telecom Design Familly
TD1204 / Sigfox & GPS
Telecom Design provides 4 different chips to support SigFox communications. This post details the differences of each of them in term of functionnalities
All are modules are based on a EFM32 / Cortex M3 micro-controler with 128KB flash, 16KB RAM, ultra low power including a Silicon Labs transceiver. The chip is a EFM32G210F128
Read more for details
My DiY lab – list of tools
This is not my lab !
I’m starting a project with a couple of friends and today they ask me : “if we want to duplicate your lab to parallelize the hardware stuff, what to we need?” That was an interesting question I want to share in this post. So I’m going to list all the stuff I’m using frequently with its price for my home hacking.
All that stuff is low end material but affordable !
Installing arduino on ATtiny45 / ATtiny85
ATtiny45 and ATtiny85 are small Atmel micro-controleur like the 328p with less legs and smaller price. They can be nice platform for really small system does not requiring a lot of I/Os.
You can install Arduino on this device really easily. I won’t describe how to do because this excellent tutorial contains all what we need.