Eclipse IoT in Grenoble

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Yesterday, I was in Grenoble for the Eclipse IoT days. It was a great opportunity to listen and learn from some actors of the IoT movement. The day was on the campus where we have been invited to see some student work on home automation and robotic for telepresence (see my twitter photo feed). The day was intensive on conferences with the really good quality and interest.

Most of the discussions / demonstrations were based on Home Automation, Smart house and globally telemetry. Not many industrial applications has been shown but some of the companies are working on industrial domain. Most of what has been shown is applicable on industry.

All the project are separating sensors, based on low cost / low energy devices associated to a local management/administration platform connected to Internet. The technology in use are mostly :

– RF and ZigBee for sensor to management platform

– Java for the management platform running the OSGi platform (Java) (this is also due to the fact Eclipse were organizing the conference and OSGi is Eclipse framework) This OSGi framework integrates management tools to connect / upgrade the platform remotely.

– Mqtt to communicate on Internet

– A custom MDM solution is deployed to manage the platforms (generally based on server management solution instead of MDM solutions) like roboconf.

Regarding the different architectures, some maintain the data on site with a in-house user interface, some export data outside on “cloud”  with an on-Internet user interface. As much as I’ve seen the in-house strategy is largely loosing on performance and interface quality due to the limited power of the management platform to perform advanced HTML experience. I assume this is also related to the Java choice to run these applications.

The other interesting learning is that most of the companies are using Raspberry Pi and Arduino to prototype solutions before, I assume, building a more robust platforms. Opensource is also mainly used and presented as the only solution to make the IoT market based on standard to be integrated all-together.

Control a high power circuit with arduino

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irf9540I had to control power on an external circuit using an Arduino. the objective was to delay the power-on of a device consuming about 3A. One of the solution is to use a relay but it is a quite expensive solution another one is to use a Mosfet. This is the solution I’ll describe here.

 

 

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making a 5V – 3/4 A power supply for car

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car_alimFor one of my project, I needed to have a >3A power supply to put in my car, delivering stable 5V. For this I tried different power supply from ebay used for phone & tablets. One of them was not so bad if you connect it after engine start. The main issue with these power supply is the poor quality of the filtering and engine start spike cancellation. As my circuit is sensitive to this spike, I decided to build my own power supply.

Here is the summary of this experience … click next !

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AIX network debugging

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Since a couple of day at work I had to investigate on some network issues for an application, it seems that we have a strange ARP configuration that may be the main issue… by the way, I discovered another strange thing where icmp packets sent in burst mode (like a flood) are lost at variable rates. Here is the note on my investigations

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Arduino AtMega328p low power consumption

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For one of my projects, I want to have a really low power consumption device to be able to use a battery for many month. For this I implemented a low power solution as described here. I’ll try to simplify it a little bit and document it a little more …

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Add a HC-05 standard bluetooth port to a RFDuino (BLE)

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RFduino connected to HC-05 bluetooth

RFduino connected to HC-05 bluetooth

I was looking for a system able to work with an iPhone (Bluetooth Low Emission – LBE) and a standard android (Standard bluetooth / rfcom). The RFDuino Arduino platform I have is perfect for BLE so, I decided to add a HC-05 module for the standard bluetooth.

 

Here is the description on how to make it !

 

 

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Small ODROID-U3 platform coming out !

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Really interesting tweet I just saw about the Odroid-U3 platform you can find following this link. This platform with the size of a Raspberry PI board is a 4 ARM core 1.7Gb (cortex A9) with 2GB included. Video is HDMI 1080p.Storage is MicroSD slot. The price is really low : 58$

You can ran even Android & Linux on it.

Compared to a RPI, this sound good for video/media box applications, better than RPI. For hacking this is largely different, as you can see on the picture, GPIO connector are not so easy to access. But, you can also purchase an extension shield providing all what you are expected with 36 GPIO. To build your own shield it could be more complicated than RPI. This let me go to a question I have since months … Why RPI is not becoming less and less expensive or more & more powerful ? it have now about 2 year old.

Less negative point : like any new board coming after Raspberry, the ecosystem is actually really smaller and all third party components (box, shields) is really limited.

Now, that said … I have to order one !

ODROID-U3

ODROID-U3

BlueTooth BLE on iOS and Mac OsX

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The RfDuino arduino device i’m actually hacking is a bluetooth 4 (BLE) device. I was expecting to work with it as any bluetooth devices in a terminal session like with rfcomm in previous version of bluetooth.

In fact not ! BLE are not pairable as the classical BT device, they are discovered by the application itself. Then you have communication channel you can read or write to communicate.

Thanks to a post in a forum, I’ve found a really usefull tool lightblue allowing to connect any BLE device and send it data. This soft works on iOS and MacOsX.

You can also get Apple tool : Bluetooth explorer and Packet Logger here.