Author Archives: Paul

Montpellier Startup WeekEnd

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magicSquare startup weekend

magicSquare startup weekend

This weekend it was my first StartupWeekend I had kind of event past year having two bootcamps with my usual company for internal startup contest. By-the-way, the startup weekend is a little bit different.

That was a really nice experience I recommend. Basically, we came with some friend with a idea about providing a gaming environment for children where boy & girls can craft their own world and animate it thanks to the brick we are providing, using a programming language composed by domino they can manipulate. They won’t use any screen, only wood & plastic stuff that interacts with their crafted world.

After pitching this, we created a team by “hiring” people found in the crowd of participants. Some was from non selected ideas, some has came by curiosity and we got a nice mix of skills to start hacking the idea. Hacking the business model, hacking the technical solution…

After 2 days of intense work we had a final pitch where the top 3 of ideas has been selected by a jury and got some prizes. Even if our team has not been selected, we had a really great days seen all these nice ideas transformed in a weekend ; starting from quite nothing to become a credible business to develop.

We went to kickstart an idea, hack it, confirm hypothesis, meet people, meet future clients… and get fun ! for all of this it was a great success I’m happy to have done and to share this spirit ; here is a video we made during the event !

magicSquare par Disk91

Thank you all – eva, nico, bruno, gautier, pierrick, teo, alex, mathieu – and the staff & coach team for this weekend. Special thank to @olivez – we are looking at your photos 🙂

I now waiting for the next event like this !

Have fun with solar panels for IoT

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Ixys solar panel

Ixys solar panel

I’m looking at solar energy to power IoT device that will be used in a car. I did not found a lot of documentation on what we can do with solar panel and what kind of energy we can expect to get with a such system.

This post will summarize the information I got on solar panels and measures done.

 

 

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TD LAN range test

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Telecom Design LAN capability is a 9600bps rf 868 transmission you can use with the sigfox modem to communicate between multiple TD120x devices. One of the main use is to have multiple sensors communicating to a sigfox gateway. The communication get benefit of the nice ultra narrow band RF transceiver included in the chip.

TD LAN is based on GFSK modulation on 25kHz channels working at 9600bps.

I did really remember where but I read it could reach long distance in the best conditions, so as it could open many opportunities, I wanted to test it in real conditions to see what we could get from it.

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Get start with the SigRPI Shield

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Raspberry PI Shiel Hat standard

Raspberry PI Shiel Hat standard

The SigRPI shield is a HAT standard board providing SigFox connectivity to your Raspberry PI. As it is not certified for this network it can’t be used in production for this usage, but you can use it as a long range RF that does not need certification. I will later details this with a project related to this function.

By-the-way, the purpose of this board is to let you play easily with sigfox. The raspberry-pi offering a really efficient way to code and to make prototypes.

The shield comes with TD1204 (including accelerometer & GPS) of TD1208 (sigfox modem). You can use it with the standard firmware or upload your own one.

The shield can be ordered in the shop section : here

This posts details how to setup it and use it.

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Use cflash tool to upgrade Telecom Design Firmware

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In the Telecom Design SDK, you have a cflash tool you can use to reflash your firmware from a serial port. This can be usefull to reflash a TD chip from another chip of from an embedded platform like a RaspberryPI.

This peace of code is not really nicely documented, so to avoid spending to many tries, here is the result of my investigations

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Backed Domino IO project !

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Domino IO - IoT enabler

Domino IO – IoT enabler

I do not usually post more than a tweet when backing on a KickStarter project but as for this time there is a French guy included  in the project, it is a good opportunity to do it !

The Domino IO project is an interesting platform to connect one of your home stuff ! It contains a powerful CPU, the network connectivity and all what you need to quickly make your own design.

This platform is really looking like the SparkCore under steroïd having eaten a Carambola engine. The chip is provided for $10 on Kickstarter ; this is 2.5 time less than carambola and 2 times less than Sparkcore. Sound like the missing element between RaspberryPi and Arduino.

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IoT disruption, why it is the appropriate time ?

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In a previous post I explained why the IoT is appearing in this period thanks to the network technology evolution. It would not be a complete analysis if I would not care about the social evolution. In parallel of IoT and technologies there are other rising trends : Makers, Fablabs, embedded systems, 3d printing and crowd-founding.

Take a look at personal computing some decades ago when guys like Jobs or Gates make the first line of code and solder the first micro-processors in their garage ; they just used the technological elements available that time and were able to make them doing much more than what they have been made for. They did it because they were able to do it. The same story appends in the late 90’s with Internet : anyone was able to code some PHP stuff and create a service in his garage thanks to this students have created Facebook and many more.

At the opposite, when smart phone appeared in the middle of the 90’s it was a technology that requires strong industrial assets and this technology has been limited to major companies. The smart-phone revolution had been the same opening door to programmer to an new area with applications (apps). In fact all previous hardware evolutions since the Personal Computer beginning was requiring huge technological assets to be part of it.

IoT disruption is breaking these last 40 years where only software were hackable by getting hardware accessible.

Let see why

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IoT, M2M, quick panorama on main technologies

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rfrpi_3This year M2M and IoT are two of the most heard keywords in our technological domain. One of these is fresh new, I mean a couple of year old, when the other one is pretty much older. M2M, standing for Machine to Machine is a capability for two machines (or more) to discuss together and take actions. Like a temperature sensor allowing your boiler to decide when to start or stop. In the industry where automatism are in place since many year, M2M is something in place, running, not new. IoT, standing for Internet of Things is part of the M2M technology but actually raising. In IoT the main word is Internet and it stands for the capability of an object to talk over Internet on its own. Why only now ? mostly because now it starts to be possible.

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