SigFox downlink is now available since the Telecom Design SDK 5. This allow to send a message to your SigFox device from the network. You have a 4 message a day limitation.
This post will explain how to configure and use SigFox downlink
lipo battery
LiPo (Lithium Polymere) batteries are interesting batteries for IoT as they are nt so much expensive, easy to get with multiple form factors and multiple capacities. As they are used for radioguided planes and such toys, you have a lot of really small batteries available for a couple of euros.
The Lipo battery is typically providing 3.7V. This sounds good for 3.3V circuit. The charging circuit is quite easy and low expensive compare to some others battery technology.
But there is no miracle and a couple of problem I’m actually discovering and this post will introduce.
Since this morning, myTeepi project has been launched on the Ulule crowdfounding platform. This solution is a smart way to care of your distant house, it works in a context with NO internet, NO phone … No power supply ! Yes it is !
Take a look here : http://fr.ulule.com/myteepi-connecte/
TD1205 – sigfox
The TD1205 device is more than the usual Telecom Design Sigfox embedded circuit as TD1204 and TD1208, they are a all in one chip providing GPS antenna and RF antenna. Ready to use, to be clear you just need to plug a battery to use it.
In my point of view, for many applications not requiring more than 2 GPIOs, this product is really easy and chip way to design a SigFox product. As it costs around 55$ and you just have to add box & battery id sounds like the most affordable for small quantities. But …
This post is detailing what is specific to this chip ; read more following the link
2 TD1208 configured as RF Lan
TD1208, SigFox chips, include a RF LAN fonction, this allow you to communicate between different TD1208 chip, locally, without using the SigFox network. This is really interesting if you have a network of sensor, you can connect them this way to a gateway. This gateway will then transmit the information to the SigFox network to reach your IoT service.
This post will describe how the rf_lan work and how to implement it.
I’m not fully sure I implement it the right way as the given example are really poor, the documentation is a mess and the source code of this part is not accessible… More over, my feeling is that this part of the SDK is still running bugs. What I mean is that in a future post you should find an update and a better way to do it than the one I’m going to describe. By-the-way, what is here is working, have fun with it !
My last post was about a demonstration of what you can do in 5 minutes with MQTT. This video was part of a global MQTT presentation I’ve done for Clermont’ech APIHours.
Here is a full version of this talk in English. For French reader, the video of the talk in French will come soon as soon as Clermont’ech team will finalize it.
Enjoy !
Slide are here : http://slides.com/disk91/mqtt#/
To prepare a presentation of MQTT for tomorrow, I just finished a MQTT / Mosquitto demonstration in a 4 minutes video. Enjoy !
Pir sensor
In a previous blog post I described how I built a PIR sensor connected to Internet, based on the use of a Raspberry Pi device. As you can read in this previous post, the solution have a certain number of complexities like requiring a power supply, a 3G modem …
As it was originally planed to be done, here is the design of the same product, based on a SigFox device. This is really interesting to demonstrate the differences and the advantages of this technology. Let’s review how to built it !