Measure and store multiple temperature with Arduino

Arduino Temperature SensorFor a certain IoT design I had to understand how my box design impacts the temperature of the circuit and of my battery. To understand how it works in the real environment, I made a small circuit based on an Arduino Nano to get temperature with 6 different sensors and store it in a flash memory for later use.

This post describes the way to do this multi-temperature sensor platform. Code is under GPL.

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LoRaWAN is coming !

Lora-300x171Last week, Objenious (a bouygues Telecom company) has announced the availability of its LoRaWAN network in France. With already 32 cities covered, about 50% of people can access to the low power network. More over they have announced the deployment of 4000 antennas by end of the year to cover the whole country.

I had the opportunity to test the network and as far as now, I can say it works well, the backend is nice even if it sounds a bit not intuitive yet but for sure they will fix it soon. The good news was a communication about price, with a range of 12€ to 1€ depending on volume, the pricing is really near Sigfox one in a first look. The volume scale will be really important to see the difference as the technical offer (message limit, bandwidth, downlink limit if we have some or not).

In my point of view, Orange is the one loosing most with this announce as they are supposed to start soon with 11 cities in France and they did not yet communicate on the scaling. So now, we are waiting for Orange response and offer in this competition.

The surprising thing in the Objenious announced was the roaming capability with USA as the LoRa frequencies are not compatible between Europe and USA. As most of the device are not yet dual band and the question of detecting the location before emitting still an issue for such use-case, I do not really see how it can have a short term positive impact on project. By-the-way, I was also not aware the LoRaWAN specification for roaming was published. Is it ?

So welcome to Objenious in LPWAN french market, competition is always a good think, and what you announced sounds good and useful for object maker like me.

 

RN2483 downlink considerations

Microchip RN2483 Lora

Microchip RN2483 Lora

Making downlink working correctly with RN2483 on LoRaWan is not a simple a quick thing to do if you do not have all the keys to do it. After spending some time to fix my code for this, here are the tips to consider and not forget !

 

 

 

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LoRa experience in a real city environment

Lora-300x171I was looking for a real LoRaWan experimentation on the field, not only a given open field performance where the result do not match the reality.

For this reason, I installed a Kerlink gateway on a friend’s balcony living on a high part of my city. Then I moved a tracker reporting its GPS position on regular basis and day after day I built a map of the area covered by this antenna.

This post details the results of this expermientation

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Devoxx 2016 – IoT talk about

During last Devoxx in Paris, I made a talk about IoT and Sigfox with my friend Daniel. Here is the talk (in french).

 

Make your IoT design on Sigfox or LoRa ?

LoravsSigfoxOnce you have found the great idea of the year and you want to start implementing your first prototype it is time to choose the right technology. Some would say you should not choose at this step and implement both at end but in my point of view it looks like and economical mistake to do this way. Prototype is to demonstrate and final product. It can request another technology, for sure. But in my point of view the best is to take the right one at the beginning. For most LoRa and Sigfox are both equivalent or for some others one is over the other one, best depends who you ask. In my point of view, if I consider my 2-3 years sigfox experience and my starting experience on LoRa with 1 year background research on it, there is no magic answer. Context of your idea is the keypoint then you have some technical elements to take into account to finalize your decision.

This post will try to illustrate where each of the technology is the best and give you some decision keypoints.

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CES2016 – discover unveiled and market trends

IMG_4108Today was CES2016 first press day with 2 major events : conference on digital consumer market trends and CES unveiled with 125+ startup and larger companies presenting innovations & products.

For this second event, a large part of the startup were coming from France and they had most of the more interesting innovation ! that is a great news in my opinion.

CES is waiting for 150.000 attendes this year and shows about 20.000 different products. 500 startups from 29 countries. As Olivier Ezratty told me many time today, on the 500 startup 1/4 are coming from France, and represents half of the non-USA startup.

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NRF 51 BLE library for custom services

nrf51 ble stack

nrf51 ble stack

After building my first project using an nRF51 device from the template given in the SDK I was really disappointed by the result, I mean, it works but the code is really bad and hard to maintain.

The given examples are not really generic and if you have to create your custom ble service and characteristics you have  to make many modification in a code that is not clean for all.

So my second project was to create a ble library to make creation of custom services & characteristics as easy as possible and to create a main file with less code.

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