Tag Archives: IoT

Battery selection for IoT design

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When making an IoT project the battery choice is something really important. Batteries stands for autonomy, sizing, price and usage conditions.

There is no universal solution to power your device, the right battery really depends on your requirements. To find the right powering solution you need to consider a certain number of parameters. We will try in this post to list most of them. This post is not exhaustive: I’m not a battery expert. This post is based on my own experience and you may consider it as a starting point, not a solution.

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Battery technologies usually used for IoT compared

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As it is a recurrent question to find the right battery for an IoT design, I decided to write a post about this topic. I’m not claiming to be an expert of this and I’ll not give insight on this. The purpose is to list the different technology existing with the main characteristics to be able to use the best fitting technologies quickly.

This post is presenting a table of the different battery’s technologies available with the main characteristics. These characteristics are global one regarding the technology. Each of the battery vendor can have specific specifications a bit different. You will need to take a look on datasheets details.

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Yadom Murata CMWX1ZZABZ-091 breakout board under review

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Murata CMWX1ZZABZ chip is actually famous for being a powerful LoRaWan multi zone module also able to communicate over Sigfox.

I’ve already published a technical post on Murata CMWX1ZZAB chip in a previous post. You will also find an implementation based on my IoT SDK. Yadom has just released a breakout board ( BRKABZ01) for this chip making it accessible for hackers and for easier prototyping.

This post is going to review this board and demo how to access it really quickly. Are you ready ?

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Fongwah S9 NFC Reader

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I’m actually working on a device using a NFC chip from ST. Unfortunately, this chip is not using the ISO-14443 norms but the less usual ISO-15693 one. As a consequence the NFC reader I had were not compatible with this norms. I found a solution (there are not a lot) in Amazon to covert this need. The Fongwah S9 NFC Reader. I made this post to share my test experience of this device.

Precision: this is not a post made for Fongwah, I really have to crash my head on this device and the purpose of this post is to save your time. The fondwah S9 is a nice tool with a multi-language (on top of C library) SDK but it is delivered with no easy documentations, broken links and no reference on ISO-15693 support… I was a bit disappointed once the box opened.

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HopeRF RFM95 and arduino a low cost LoRaWan solution

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The HopeRF RFM95w module proposes to access LoRa at low cost. Its unitary price is around 4€ on shop like aliexpress. A version with a shield is also existing. Its name is Lora1276-C1 from niceRF. These different transceivers are using Semtech SX1276 chip. It makes this kind of chip interesting for regional low cost LoRaWAN design in association with a MCU. Here we are going to use it with an Arduino platform.

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The Sigfox Micro Base Station test

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The Sigfox Micro basestation has been announced during the last Sigfox Connect event in Berlin. The base-station allow to extend the Sigfox public network, at low price, for your private location.

This post is detailing my experience with the micro base-station and the field test I’ve made on an industrial site.

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LIbrenard is out – Open Source Sigfox stack implementation

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Sigfox is not publishing its detailed specifications. For this reason different people (like me) are doing reverse engineering. Thank to this activity we are now getting more and more information on how the IoT network communication works. I’ve been the first one to publish the uplink frame in details more than a year ago.

Today, during the 35th edition of CCC Congress, Florian Euchner has published, on Github, the first Open-Source Sigfox stack : LibRenard.

This library allows to transform a Sigfox radio signal into a decoded frame (uplink demodulation). It allows to create a Sigfox radio signal from a decoded frame (downlink modulation).

The LibRenard implementation follows the Open Sigfox Protocol specification also host on Github from Florian. It details the uplink as the downlink communication frames. Making this open specification as the real first Sigfox global protocol specification published.

I really want to congratulate Florian for this excellent work. I hope the stack will be soon enriched with the native Sigfox encryption I’ve just finished to detail, with the associated OOB frames.

10 things you can’t ignore when writing a Firmware

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When you write an IoT firmware, there are different things you may never forget to think about… The coming 10 things you can’t ignore are coming from my experience of smart object creation and the associated field experience.

The field experience is unfortunately the real step where you will improve your firmware and discover all you have forgotten when you have written the firmware and tested it in your laboratory. In laboratory everything is perfect.

The following 10 things you can’t ignore when writing a Firmware is a non exhaustive checklist of points to verify before pushing your code to the field. It is also a list of  test conditions you can execute to validate a Firmware / device made by a third party.

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