CNX Software - Embedded Systems News

July 29, 2020July 29, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 12 Comments

TTGO T-Lite W5500 ESP32 WiFi & Bluetooth Board Comes with OLED Display, Optional Ethernet Add-on Board

If you like tiny boards with Ethernet, TTGO T-Lite W5500 development board may be an interesting option, as the ESP32 board comes with a built-in OLED, and female headers to connect an Ethernet add-on board called W5500 Gateway Module. LilyGO TTGO T-Lite W5500 specifications: SoC – Espressif System ESP32 dual-core WiFi and Bluetooth SoC with 520KB SRAM Storage – 4MB flash Display – 0.96-inch OLED display (SSD1306 driver) Connectivity 802.11 b/g/n WiFi 4 up to 150 Mbps, and Bluetooth 5.x BR/LE via ESP32 SoC, on-board ceramic antenna or external antenna (selectable with a resistor?) Optional Ethernet via SPI Ethernet board based on Wiznet W5500 USB – 1x USB Type-C port for power and programming via CP2104 USB to TTL chip I/Os 8+6 through holes with GPIOs, SPI, ADC, Touch, 5V, 3.3V, GND Operating voltage – 2.7V-3.6V Misc – Boot & Reset button, 40MHz crystal oscillator Power Supply – 5V/1A via […]

July 29, 2020January 28, 2021 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

Industrial-Grade Optical Rain Gauge Beams Infrared Light to Measure Rainfall

I remember when I was a kid, we had rain gauge to measure the amount of rainfall in the garden, so after heavy rains, I liked to have a look to find out how much rain actually fell. Those collected water in a tube, and we could read the millimeter value right on the tube. But now with the Internet of Things, we can have smarter solutions including tipping-bucket rain gauges that collect water and usually report the data via an RS-232 port. But I’ve just found out there’s another method to measure rainfall with an industrial-grade optical rain gauge I just found on Seeed Studio for $99.00. It’s a sphere about the size of half a tennis ball that beams infrared light instead of collecting water and somehow managed to accurately report the amount of rainfall. RG-15 optional rain gauge specifications: Nominal Accuracy – ±10% Host Interfaces J1 Terminal […]

July 28, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

EMIT ESP32 IoT Development Board Comes with Temperature & Humidity Sensor, 5A SPST Relay (Crowdfunding)

ControlBits EMIT (Environmental Monitoring for the Internet of Things) is a baseboard compatible with DOIT ESP32 DevKit V1 development board and equipped with a temperature and humidity sensor, a relay, a 12-pinGPIO connector, and a MicroSD card. EMIT ESP32 IoT development board specifications: Socket for DOIT ESP32 DevKit v1 board with WiFi and Bluetooth LE connectivity Storage – MicroSD card socket Sensor – AM2302 temperature & humidity sensor with -40° to +80° C and 0 to 99.9 %RH ranges. Relay – 5A SPST relay output with status LED Expansion – 12-pin GPIO header Misc – 2x programmable status LEDs (red & green) Power Supply – 5V via USB on ESP32 board, or external 7-12 V supply via terminal block Dimensions – 81 x 81 mm (PCB only) The board comes with mounting holes so it can be wall-mounted, and an optional enclosure is also available. Some applications for the board […]

July 28, 2020July 28, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

M.2 and Half-size mPCIe Cards Support Real-Time Ethernet and FieldBus Networks

Hilscher cifX M.2 and half-size mini PCIe cards powered by the company’s NETX 90 network-on-chip multi-protocol Cortex-M4 SoC bring real-time Ethernet and FieldBus to compatible systems. The tiny cards are designed for PC-based devices such as IPC’s, HMI’s and robots, and support various firmware for PROFINET IO-Device, EtherNet/IP Adapter, EtherCAT Slave, or OpenModbus/TCP. The company claims its cifX M.2 (A+E key) and half-size mini PCIe cards are the smallest multiprotocol PC cards on the automation market with a size of 22×30 mm and 30×26.8 mm respectively. The cards also support extended temperature from -20°C to 70°C and offer one hardware platform for all real-time Ethernet slave protocols. Besides PROFINET IO-Device, EtherNet/IP Adapter, EtherCAT Slave, and OpenModbus/TCP, Hilscher will provide support for CC-Link IE Field Basic and Ethernet POWERLINK Slave in new firmware available in Q4 2020, and OPC UA and MQTT functionalities are planned for future releases. The cards are […]

July 28, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

Is That a Raspberry Pi Zero? Nope. ATMegaZero is an Arduino Compatible Board

ATMegaZero is an Arduino Leonardo compatible board based on Microchip ATmega32U4 8-bit AVR microcontroller that mostly follows Raspberry Pi Zero form factor with the 40-pin GPIO header, MicroSD card slot, and one micro USB port in the same location. The MIPI CSI camera connector makes place for an OLED display connector, and the HDMI port is obviously gone, but you also get an 8-pin header to easily install an ESP8266 based ESP-01 module to add WiFi connectivity. ATMegaZero specifications: MCU – Microchip ATmega32U4 microcontroller running at 16MHz with 32KB Flash, 2.5KB SRAM, 1KB EEPROM Storage – MicroSD card Display – 32-pin OLED display port compatible with 30-pin SSD1306 and SSD1331 based displays Wireless Connectivity – 8-pin header for optional ESP8266 ESP-01 WiFi module Expansion – 40-pin Raspberry Pi-inspired GPIO header with UART/SPI/I2C Debugging & Programming – Micro USB port, 6-pin programming header Misc – 4x LEDs, button Power Supply – […]

July 27, 2020February 21, 2022 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 4 Comments

Sonoff Zigbee Bridge Now Supports Tasmota Firmware, Home Assistant, Zigbee2Tasmota

Sonoff Zigbee Bridge & Tasomota Home Assistant

Sonoff ZBBridge (aka Sonoff Zigbee Bridge) WiFi to Zigbee gateway was launched a few months ago for $16.90 plus shipping, and it’s now also listed on Banggood for $17.99 shipped. It allows users to control Zigbee devices connected to the gateway using the eWelink mobile app used with other Sonoff devices. But many people like to run Tasmota firmware on their Sonoff devices since it’s open-source and provided more flexibility such as integration with Home Assitant or Domoticz. There was already support for Zigbee in Tasmota at the time but only for Texas Instruments SimpleLink CC253x Zigbee MCU’s, and Sonoff ZBBridge is made of an ESP8266 WiSoC and a Silicon Labs EFR32MG21 Gecko Series 2 Cortex-M33 Zigbee microcontroller. So I just suspected that eventually, Sonoff Zigbee Bridge could support Tasmota open-source firmware but that would take some time… It took about four months. Not too bad. It started in the […]

July 27, 2020December 2, 2022 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Edge Impulse Enables Machine Learning on Cortex-M Embedded Devices

Artificial intelligence used to happen almost exclusively in the cloud, but this introduces delays (latency) for the users and higher costs for the provider, so it’s now very common to have on-device AI on mobile phones or other systems powered by application processors. But recently there’s been a push to bring machine learning capabilities to even lower-end embedded systems powered by microcontrollers, as we’ve seen with GAP8 RISC-V IoT processor or Arm Cortex-M55 core and the Ethos-U55 micro NPU for Cortex-M microcontrollers, as well as Tensorflow Lite. Edge Impulse is another solution that aims to ease deployment of machine learning applications on Cortex-M embedded devices (aka Embedded ML or TinyML) by collecting real-world sensor data, training ML models on this data in the cloud, and then deploying the model back to the embedded device. The company collaborated with Arduino and announced support for the Arduino Nano 33 BLE Sense and […]

July 27, 2020July 28, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 4 Comments

ECM3532 AI Sensor Board Features Cortex-M3 MCU & 16-bit DSP “TENSAI” SoC for TinyML Applications

Eta Compute ECM3532 is a system-on-chip (SoC) with a Cortex-M3 microcontroller clocked at up to 100 Mhz, and NXP CoolFlux 16-bit DSP designed for machine learning on embedded devices, aka TinyML, and part of the company’s TENSAI platform. The chip is also integrated into the ECM3532 AI sensor board featuring two MEMS microphones, a pressure & temperature sensor, and a 6-axis motion sensor (accel/gyro) all powered by a CR2032 coin-cell battery. ECM3532 AI sensor board specifications: SoC – ECM3532 neural sensor processor with Arm Cortex-M3 core @ up to 100 MHz (< 5μA/MHz run mode) combines with 512KB embedded FLASH, 256KB SRAM, and 8KB BootROM + secure bootloader, and NXP CoolFlux 16-bit DSP @ up to 100 MHz with 32KB program memory, 64KB data memory. See the product brief for details. Storage – 64Mbit serial Flash for datalogging Connectivity – Bluetooth 4.2 LE via ABOV Semiconductor A31R118 and PCB antenna […]