ANAVI Gas Detector ESP8266 Board Monitors Air Quality, Toxic Gases (Crowdfunding)

ANAVI Gas Detector

Leon ANAVI is a software engineer with an interest in open-source hardware, and he had previously launched several ANAVI boards for home automation based on Espressif ESP8266 or for Raspberry Pi boards including ANAVI thermometer, ANAVI light controller, and ANAVI Infrared pHAT among others. Leon has now introduced a new board on Crowd Supply: ANAVI gas detector. The board is powered by ESP8266 WiSoC providing WiFI connectivity, and supports MQ gas sensor modules such as MQ-135, MQ-2, or MQ-3 in order to monitor air quality and detect gas leaks. ANAVI gas detector board specifications: Wireless Module – Based on ESP8266 Tensilica L106 32-bit processor with Wi-Fi 4 802.11 b/g/n connectivity Display – Optional Mini OLED display Gas sensor support – MQ-135 for air quality or any other 5V MQ analog gas sensor Expansion – 3x slots for I²C sensors Debugging / Programming – UART pins for flashing custom firmware Misc […]

Arduino based Clover Platform Targets STEM Education in Vietnam

Clover Vietnam Makers

We’re already seen there’s an active maker community in South East Asia with products such as KidBright32 educational board in Thailand, and Singapore & Thailand based MakerAsia’s recent launch of the open-source KB-IDE for ESP32 targets. Vietnam based Clover Team also introduced a STEM platform for students late last year with hardware, an IDE, and a mobile application. The team has made three educational kits: Clover EDU Basic with Clover Master Board and basic modules Clover Car Robot with Clover Master Board, motor, motor driver module, line sensor, distance sensor, Bluetooth module Clover Inventor that includes all items from Clover EDU Basic and Clover Car Robot plus a WiFi module. The Master board is compatible with the Arduino UNO platform (software-wise) and comes with the following key features: Connectivity – Header for ESP8266 WiFi module Expansion – 4x RJ11 ports for input and output with color signs, and compatible with […]

Getting Started with Temperature & Humidity Sensors on ESP8266 using ANAVI Thermometer

ANAVI Thermometer Air / Humidity / Water

ANAVI Thermometer was launched on CrowdSupply in January.  It is an ESP8266 WiFi board with a built-in DHT22 temperature and humidity sensor, support for external DS18B20 waterproof temperature sensor, as well as other sensors thanks to three I2C sensors. I received the ANAVI Thermometer starter kit last month, and I’ve only found time to play with it in the last few days. I’ll start with a unboxing, assembly guide, before showing it action, and I’ll try to make it interface with Home Assistant over MQTT. ANAVI Thermometer Starter Kit Unboxing The kit comes with ANAVI Thermometer board, a plastic stand, a USB to TTL debug board, an I2C OLED display, a few nuts and bolts, and a couple of KiCad and ANAVI stickers. Leon ANAVI also added a traffic light board and LEDs, but it’s not normally part of the kit 🙂 ANAVI Thermometer board include an ESP8266 module, AM2302 […]

The Things Industries Announces $69 Indoor Multi-Channel LoRaWAN Gateway

Indoor Multi-channel LoRaWAN Gateway

If you ever see a cheap LoRaWAN gateway, chances are that it is a single channel gateway such as Dragino LoRa gateways that can be purchased for as low as $56. Those will work for your private network, but if others people try to use your gateway, some LoRa nodes will fail to connect. So what you really need is a multi-channel gateway for instance to connect it to The Things Networks. That would be $200 (and up), thank you very much. The IoT can only succeed on a large scale if costs are low enough, so Things Industries decided to design, and has now unveiled a low cost indoor multi-channel LoRaWAN gateway. Meet The Things Indoor Gateway. The Things Indoor Gateway specifications: SoC – Espressif System ESP8266 WiSoC Wireless Connectivity 802.11 b/g/n WiFi 4 via ESP8266 + PCB antenna LoRaWAN via Semtech 1308 chipset with Support for 868 MHz […]

XinaBox’s xChips Enable Modular Electronics for Makers & STEM Education

Xinabox xCHIPS ESP8266 UV Index Monitor

So today, I decided to have a look a 96Boards website to see if there was anything new from the community, and I came accross “X in a Box B901“, an “☒CHIP is designed to interface with the 96 Boards, such as the Dragonboard 410c. This provides an interface to support the ☒CHIP ecosystem, adding support for many additional sensors etc…” I had no idea what it was all about, so obviously I had to investigate. Xinabox (X in a Box) is an ecosystem of modular electronics boards used for developing, making products and learning. There are now over 70 modular xChip” with cores/CPUs, sensors, power, communication, output, and storage. They are interconnected together without wires, soldering, breadboards, and adapters are provided for Raspberry Pi, 96Boards, and other development boards. xChips can be sorted into 8 categories: Cores – MCU/CPI cores based on Microchip ATMega328P, SAMD21, ESP8266, or ESP32 with […]

PSLab Electronics Lab Board is Now Available for $65

PSLab Electronics Lab

Pocket Science Lab (PSLab) is an open source hardware USB board that aims to bring electronics labs to the masses, as it can act as an oscilloscope, voltmeter, programmable voltage and current source, logic analyzer, or signal generator when connected to a PC or mobile phone. This is not professional equipment, and instead designed for STEM education. When we first covered the board in August, it was still in development, but I’ve just found it is now listed and in stock on Seeed Studio for $64.90. FOSSASIA and OpnTec are the organization behind the board’s development. Here’s a reminder of PSLab board main specifications: MCU – Microchip PIC24EP256GP204 16-bit microcontroller @ up to 70 MHz with 32KB SRAM, 256KB flash Wireless Connectivity Footprint for ESP8266 module (ESP-12E) for 802.11 b/g/n WiFi (on bottom of board) Bluetooth extension slot 4-Channel, up to 2MSPS Oscilloscope 12-bit Voltmeter. Programmable gain. Input ranges from […]

ANAVI Thermometer WiFi Board is Designed for Home Automation (Crowdfunding)

ESP8266 Thermostat

ANAVI Technology launched several open source hardware boards for the Raspberry Pi and ESP8266 maker communities in the past, starting with RabbitMax Flex home automation HAT for Raspberry Pi, and several others including ANAVI Light Controller ESP8266 board to control LED strips. All boards are designed with KiCad opensource EDA software, and I’ve tested several already such as ANAVI Infrared pHAT or ANAVI Light Controller, and found documentation to be very good and easy to follow. The company has now launched another ESP8266 board with ANAVI Thermometer that allows you to monitor temperature and humidity, effectively acting as a thermostat for home automation. ANAVI Thermometer specifications: SoC –  Espressif Systems ESP8266 Tensilica L106 32-bit processor Connectivity – WiFi 802.11 b/g/n Display – Mini OLED display Build-in sensor – AM2302 (DHT22) temperature and humidity sensor Expansion Terminal block for DS18B20 waterproof temperature sensor UART pins 3x slots for I2C sensors Misc – […]

Year 2018 in Review, Top 10 Posts, and Some Stats

cnx software year 2018 review

That’s it, we’ve already reached the last day of 2018, and it’s time to have a look back at what happened during the past year. On the mini PC front, Gemini Lake based mini PCs took over from Apollo Lake with some performance improvements, but I expected the price point to be a bit lower than it is today.  Apart from further developments with regards to mobile processors, it feels 2018 was an off-year for processors, such as the ones found in TV boxes and development boards, with mostly more of the same. Allwinner and Rockchip did not release any really interesting processor, and Amlogic only launched S905X2 and S905Y2 which are mostly evolutions of their previous generation with an OpenGL 3.x capable GPU and USB 3.0. Rockchip RK3399 stood out this year, as despite being launched in 2016, it suddenly became popular again with many RK3399 SBCs coming to […]