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TTGO T-Higrow is a WiFi & Bluetooth connected soil temperature & moisture sensor

LilyGO has made plenty of ESP32 “TTGO” boards with various features be it PoE, battery support, OLED display, cellular connectivity, and even a devkit in watch form factor. The latest product from the company specifically targets smart farming/gardening as TTGO T-Higrow embeds either DHT11 temperature and humidity sensor or BME280 temperature, humidity, and barometric sensor to report soil temperature and moisture over Bluetooth or WiFi. It can also come as a kit with a battery and a 3D printed enclosure. TTGO T-Higrow board specifications: SoC – Espressif Systems ESP32 dual-core LX6 processor @ up to 240 MHz with 520 LB SRAM, Wi-Fi & Bluetooth Storage – 4MB QSPI flash Wireless 2.4 GHz 802.11b/g/n WiFi 4 up to 150 Mbps Bluetooth 4.2 BR/EDR and BLE Sensors Option 1 – DHT11 temperature and humidity sensor Option 2 – BME280 temperature, humidity, and barometric sensor Expansion – 2x 12-pin through holes with UART, […]

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STM32 based Indoor Air Quality Sensor Connects to Raspberry Pi or Arduino (Crowdfunding)

Even before the COVID-19 lockdown, people spent most of their time indoors (around 90% according to some studies), so it’s important to monitor air quality and other metrics like light and sound levels in our homes, workplaces, schools, cars, etc… Metriful Sense indoor environment monitor does just that by reporting multiple metrics such as temperature, humidity, particle concentration, etc… over I2C to microcontroller or processor boards such as Arduino or Raspberry Pi. Sense hardware specifications: MCU – STMicro STM32G071KB Arm Cortex-M0+ microcontroller @ 64 MHz with 128 KB Flash, 36 KB SRAM Sensors Bosch Sensortec BME680 4-in-1 air quality sensor with relative humidity, barometric pressure, ambient temperature, and gas (VOC). Vishay VEML6030 ambient light sensor Knowles SPH0645LM4H-B MEMS microphone Optional – Shinyei PPD42 particle sensor unit I/Os – 10-pin unpopulated header with air particles sensor input, light and sound interrupt outputs, I2C, VPU pin for 3.3V/5V selection, GND, VDD, VIN […]

Khadas Edge2 Arm mini PC
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Getting Started with Qoitech Otii Developer Tool using ESP8266 and Raspberry Pi 4 Boards

Last month, I received Qoitech Otii Arc power supply, power meter, and DAQ unit that aims at helping hardware and software engineers develop energy-efficient products. I’ve now had time to test the unit with an ESP8266 board and Raspberry Pi 4 SBC, so I’ll show how to get started and my overall experience with the hardware and program. Requirements and Initial Setup The unit takes a 9V power supply or micro USB adapter as power input, but power output is done through banana plugs. I did not have any cables with banana plugs so I bought one on eBay for about $5 shipped. This cable is really convenient with output to USB (female connector), crocodile clips, and hook clips. However, as we’ll see below it may not be suitable for all types of loads, and you may have to make your own with a higher rated cable. You’ll need to […]

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How to Improve Productivity with an ESP8266 Light Controller & Andon Manufacturing System

ANAVI Light controller was launched in 2018, and I had the chance to review a sample and wrote a guide showing how to use an ESP8266 board to control an LED strip using Arduino code, MQTT protocol, and HTML5 code. It’s a fun toy for people using it at home, but Paul Cancouët – working for Wing company offering “Logistics as a Service” solutions – added several ANAVI Light controllers to their packing warehouse. You can see the lights on the left side of the packing stations. Those are pretty, but what are they for? The lights help to improve productivity using an Andon system usually found in factories, but in this case, used for packing. Andon – meaning paper lantern in Japanese – refers to a system to notify management, maintenance, and other workers of a quality or process problem with the alert either activated automatically or manually by […]

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Some Interesting Talks from FOSDEM 2020 Schedule

We wrote about IoT devroom call for proposals for FOSDEM 2020 a little while ago, and as the free open-source developer meetup is getting closer, FOSDEM 2020 organizers released the schedule. So I’ll look at some of the talks in the relevant devrooms such as the Internet of Things, hardware enablement, Embedded, Mobile and Automotive, as well as RISC-V and others to compose my own little virtual schedule for the 2-day event. Saturday, February 1 10:30 – 10:50 – How lowRISC made its Ibex RISC-V CPU core faster – Using open source tools to improve an open-source core – by Greg Chadwick Ibex implements RISC-V 32-bit I/E MC M-Mode, U-Mode, and PMP. It uses an in-order 2 stage pipe and is best suited for area and power-sensitive rather than high-performance applications. However, there is scope for meaningful performance gains without major impact to power or area. This talk describes work […]

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Giveaway Week Winners – November 2019

We just had another of our yearly “Giveaway week” on CNX Software with 7 prizes including Arm and RISC-V development boards, NB-IoT tracker, USB-C hub, as well as development kits based on ESP32 or ESP8266 WiSoCs. People just had to comment within a 48 hours period, and we would randomly select a winner each day. We now have all confirmed winners with a strong start from Europe, Asia catching up mid-week, before with Poland and Brazil taking the week-end prizes: Balena Fin Developer Kit – Laurent H, FRANCE WisCellular NB-IoT & eMTC GPS Tracker – Jimmy, SWEDEN MINIX NEO S1 USB-C Hub with 120GB built-in SSD – Jeroen, BELGIUM Maixduino Sipeed M1 RISC-V AI Kit – Nguyen Tung, VIETNAM ANAVI Gas Detector Starter Kit – Bumsik Kim, SOUTH KOREA Particle Mesh IoT Development Kit – Wojciech Lubicz-Lapinski, POLAND NanoPi M4V2 SBC & Metal Case Kit – Thiago Tavares, BRAZIL I […]

AAEON Intel Arc
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Mastak Modular Air Quality Monitor Kit Supports CO2, Dust, Formaldehyde, Ozone and other Sensor Modules

The Mastak Indoor Air Quality Monitor Kit Medium Systems Limited, a UK company has released the Mastak, SoMs designed in a mechanical range that allows for indoor air quality monitoring, with a data IoT cloud service, and communications that include NB-IoT, 5G, WiFi, BLE, and LTE-M.  The system is a new addition to the air monitoring market place. There have been reports on other air quality monitors in past articles that covered quick start and user experience with Sonoff SC WiFi, vThings WiFi CO2 Monitor, and the ANAVI Gas Detector. The Specs The ecological modules are all compatible and contain processor, peripherals and the sensors for data monitoring and collection, as well as the necessary power electronics. The modules were designed too and allow the user to arrange the systems into custom arrangements and place in unique form factors. There are a number of options also, for even further expandability […]

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PT100 Resistance Temperature Detector (RTD) Probes Support Extreme Temperature Ranges

I’ve been playing with temperature measurements in several hardware platforms such as Texas Instruments eZ430-Chronos Watch, Sonoff SC environmental monitor, Wemos D1 board with aDHT21 temperature sensor, or more recently ANAVI Thermometer with the last three platforms based on ESP8266 WiSoC. All four devices/boards above have temperature sensors designed to measure ambient temperature with for example DHT22 having a range of -40 to +125 degrees Celsius.  I had also come across DS18B20 waterproof temperature probe to measure liquid temperature several times with a range of  -55 to 125°C. Good for most use cases, and for example you could check boiling water with the later. But I had never really thought about measuring data for much lower or much higher temperatures, and this morning I came across two “PT100” temperature probes on IC Station new arrivals feed namely WZP-187 ($4.89) and an unnamed probe ($3.42) respectively capable of -200°C to +400°C […]

Khadas VIM4 SBC