Category Archives: Technology

Tips and test on technological product and components. Operating system, networks, hardware, security…
Astuces et tests autour de produits et composants technologiques, systèmes, réseaux, hardware, sécurité …

LILYGO T-Deck Plus with Meshcore

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The challenge with mesh networks such as MeshCore, Meshtastic, or similar systems is that a phone is still the most practical device for reading information, sending messages, and typing on a keyboard. However, the phone also needs to be connected to a node that can act as the bridge to the LoRa network. In practice, this means carrying several devices, which is not always convenient.

That is why I wanted to test the LILYGO T-Deck Plus. It is a LoRa device with the useful addition of a built-in screen and keyboard. This makes it possible to have a standalone device for communicating on these networks, and it should make mobile testing much easier.

I tried one, and in this post I will share the different steps I followed to get it working.

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Seeed Spartan Edge Accelerator Board, low cost FPGA

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About 20 years ago, I started working on the design of a microprocessor. The goal was mostly to have fun building a small 32-bit RISC CPU, make it open source, and, most importantly, explain the process behind it. I abandoned the project roughly 18 years ago as I moved on to other things.

This year, I want to bring the project back. Processor design was something we used to learn in univerity at the time, but today it has become much more abstract. Even understanding what actually happens inside a processor is now often treated as a fairly distant concept.

That old work is a good foundation for explaining these ideas again. For that reason, I wanted to refresh the hardware I used years ago to build the processor, which was based on an FPGA that I will discuss in more detail later. Because this is relatively professional hardware, access to FPGA development kits is usually quite expensive. And while it was honestly worth the investment, Seeed Studio has since created a development kit looking like an Arduino, includes an ESP32, and remains much more accessible. It integrates a Xilinx Spartan FPGA. It is not one of the high-end models, but it is still roughly ten times larger than the one I was using around 20 years ago, which makes it a very good fit for this project.

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MeshCore, the new Kid on the LoRa Mesh Block

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A while ago, I wrote about Meshtastic. At the time, Meshtastic was the thing everyone was talking about: tens of thousands of nodes sold, many products packaged by HELTEC, LILYGO, RAK, and Seeed Studio, and a large international community building a LoRa-based mesh network for long-range communication.

But Meshtastic was yesterday’s trend. Today, the new momentum is around MeshCore, with a significant part of the community migrating to it, especially because the required hardware platforms are largely the same. However, as we will see, MeshCore and Meshtastic are not the same thing. They are not really meant to replace each other, except perhaps for specific use cases where Meshtastic was not particularly well suited and where MeshCore provides more appropriate solutions.

This article introduces MeshCore from a technical and operational point of view, to help clarify what it is and how it works.

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The End of IoT Platforms — Why the Future Is the IoT ERP

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IoT platforms emerged early in the history of IoT, arguably too early. At the time, the industry was driven by momentum and the urgency to provide ready-to-use solutions.

Over the past decade, however, many of these platforms have been discontinued, transformed, or fundamentally redesigned. This evolution is not accidental; it reflects a deeper structural issue in how the first generation of IoT platforms was conceived.

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Frigate – Manage IP Camera with a Raspberry Pi

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As a long-time user of high-quality video surveillance systems like Synology and Ubiquiti, I’ve grown accustomed to deploying and relying on their robust, feature-rich ecosystems. However, this time I was looking for something more affordable, focused solely on video management, without the overhead of NAS capabilities or other advanced features. I needed a lightweight solution that could run on a Raspberry Pi—and on Guillaume’s recommendation, I turned to Frigate. This open-source tool offers live video stream management, recording capabilities, and even optional AI-based video analysis. It looks promising and well-built. This post is, as usual, a log of my journey testing this setup in real-time. It’s also an excuse to finally experiment with a Raspberry Pi 5, which I’ve paired with an NVMe drive for video storage, avoiding the SD card’s limited endurance under heavy I/O workloads. I’ll admit, it’s slightly ironic to now need this much power for tasks I used to run smoothly on Synology boxes over a decade ago. Even funnier is that Frigate may require a neural accelerator for its AI features—something that seems excessive when you consider modern AI models like YoLo run on microcontrollers with far less processing power. That said, I don’t plan to use AI in this setup (at least not yet), but I’ve still opted for a dual PCIe HAT to keep the door open for testing a Coral accelerator in the future.

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EchoStar IoT – the geostationary LoRaWan solution for Europe

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In previous blog posts, I introduced you to satellite-based IoT through technologies like Kinéis and Astrocast. Both of these solutions rely on constellations of satellites, typically in polar rotation around earth and low Earth orbits (LEO), which allow for global coverage—but at the cost of latency due to satellite revisit times.

This time, I want to highlight a different approach to satellite IoT: a solution called EchoStar IoT, which I had the opportunity to explore hands-on by developing a compatible device.

What sets EchoStar apart is its use of geostationary satellite technology. This means the satellite remains fixed relative to a specific area on Earth, continuously covering the same geographical zone. As a result, there is no satellite pass delay—connectivity is constant within the coverage footprint.

However, this also implies a trade-off: a single geostationary satellite cannot provide global coverage. As of today, EchoStar IoT services are available across most of Europe, parts of North Africa, and the entire Mediterranean region.

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ThingsBoard Open Source IoT platform

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ThingsBoard is an open-source IoT platform designed for device management, data collection, processing, and visualization. It supports a variety of communication protocols, including MQTT, CoAP, and HTTP, allowing seamless integration with diverse devices and sensors. The platform offers powerful tools for monitoring and controlling devices, as well as visualizing sensor data through customizable dashboards.

ThingsBoard provides essential features such as device provisioning, real-time data processing, and rule engine capabilities for automated actions based on data inputs. It also supports user role management, enabling secure access control. With its scalable architecture, ThingsBoard can be deployed on-premises or in the cloud, making it suitable for a wide range of IoT applications, from smart cities to industrial IoT use cases. The platform is highly extensible, supporting integration with third-party systems and services, ensuring flexibility for developers and businesses alike.

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Create some Mioty Devices – Step 1

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In my previous article, I shared my first steps as a Mioty user. Today, I want to dive into the creation of devices using this technology. It took me some time to publish this follow-up, as I encountered a few challenges—primarily related to an ecosystem that, unfortunately, remains stubbornly inaccessible.

In this initial post, I’ll share my experience with a ready-to-use module from Radiocraft. Future articles will explore other solutions… depending on my available time, of course. As you can probably tell, I haven’t been posting much lately, as I’ve been busy with other projects. Stay tuned!

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