As described in a previous post, TelecomDesign chip can be customized to add your own application built-in the chip and made a really affordable IoT platform. This blog post is describing the first step to start building it. Read Next for details.
I already wrote some stuff about Sigfox here, so may know that it is a really promising French technology IoT oriented. So I have a project to connect a Raspberry Pi and arduino system on a such peripheral. The use of this technology is quite easy as it works like a modem, based on AT command transfered over a 9600bps serial line. The main issue is that the chip is really CMS and hard to hack at home easily… by the way, as you see, a poor soldering makes it working for the test purpose.
As much as I have test, I can say that using this device to communicate with an Arduino or a PI is really easy ! code can be written in less than a minute ; compared to what you have to do to make wifi / Ethernet / GSM working in a stable way, this is incredibly easier ! You can also use the device as an autonomous sensor for temperature and contact switch of your choice for an affordable price. In my point of view one thing is missing : you do not really know the signal quality and if you have a good connection or not with sigfox network. [update] The RSSI is indicated in the SigFox Api on the backend side for each of the received messages [/update] . Meaning you must receive the first one to know if the location is covered or not. This can be a problem to deliver a product and get an easy support to your consumer. The other limit of the technology, as much as I know is that you can transmit data but not receive some from the SigFox network [update] The ability for the device to receive messages will be soon added with limitation, but it will [/update]. In many case it is enough but sometime you like to respond to a specific value received. Read next to get details on how to use it …
If you want to configure a wanscam outdoor IP camera without using the given tools, you just have to know that the camera is using dhcp by default and the default port is 99… That’s it !
SPI is a frequent way to interface slave device with a micro-controller / cpu. SPI is a 4 wires synchronous connection between a slave and a master. As part of the 4 wires, there is a CLK signal, the speed is not defined and depends on the slave but it is usually > 10Mhz. SPI allows fast data transfer. Two data signals (MISO and MOSI) for Master (In/Out) Slave (In/Out) are used to transfer data in sync with the CLK clock. The last wire is a chip select signal named CEx for Chip Enable. As you can manage multiple slave, you have to manage different CEx signal, one per slave.
SigFox is a French radio frequency technology allowing a really low cost data transfer from Machine to Machine. Compared to GSM, this solution have some great advantages : it costs only 10-16€ per year and the energy consumption is about 1000 time less. For sure there is some constraint and the main one is the quantity of information you can transmit. In fact you have a limit of 150 sent messages / days with a length of 12Bytes. It’s not big but is it enough for a lot of IoT and M2M applications.
This technology works as a modem you can connect to any platform like Arduino, RaspberryPi. The chips are provided by TelecomDesign from a cost about 15€. The starter kit is about 150€ here.
The great advantage of this technology, in a operator point of view is the low density of the architecture where you need only 1000 antennas to cover a territory like France. As a consequence, at this time, already 90% of the country is covered by this technology.
I had to add a 12V controlled output for my raspberry Pi to connect a radio frequency system to my Pi. This system just need 12V to start transmitting but it needs 12V ! The raspberry can offer 5V or 3.3V. The solution is to use a currant elevator system. The one I built is based on a Texas Instrument component TPS6734, able to deliver 120mA / 12V with a 3.3V input.
Last year in December, I gave a talk on Internet of Things, here is the youtube video (in French) – The slide are also here : http://slid.es/disk91/internetofthings
RfRpi card is a RF433 emitter and receiver add-on of Raspberry Pi. This card is based on high quality receiver and transmitter I have selected after tests you can find here and here. This article describes how to get start with this shield.
To buy this shield the best way is to sent me a comment on this post, the price is 60€
The Shield is now working with Raspberry PI B+ and previous versions. The Shield is also working with Raspberry PI 2+. For these two last version you need to compile a kernel driver.