Wiliot Starter Kit for retailers features a smart coffee cup tracking temperature, fill level, location, etc…

smart coffee cup with sensors, energy harvesting

Wiliot Starter Kit aims to demonstrate the ability of the Wioliot’s self-powered IoT Pixel and cloud services to retailers with a kit including a Coffee cup that’s capable of tracking liquid temperatures, fill level, motion, location changes, humidity, and proximity. The kit was previously only available to larger retailers through a “controlled release model”, but the company has now switched to an “open model” so that any retailers can use the technology to track products and packages. Let’s what’s included inside the start kit, and try to understand how the Wiliot solution works. Wiliot Starter Kit includes the following hardware: 1 x IoT Pixel-ready Coffee Cup 5 x Single-Band IoT Pixels mounted on cardboards 5 x Dual-Band IoT Pixels mounted on cardboards 1 x Single-Band Bridge Device 1 x Dual-Band Bridge Device You’ll also get 6 months of Wiliot Cloud Services, access to the Wiliot community forum & support Portal, […]

Microchip SAM L22 board makes Casio F-91W watch more customizable (Crowdfunding)

Casio F-91W Microchip SAM L22 board

Casio F-91W is a popular watch that was first released in 1989, and it is still sold today for around $15. The team at “Oddly Specific Objects” decided to create the “Sensor Watch” open-source hardware board based on Microchip SAM L22 Cortex-M0+ microcontroller that can replace the electronics inside the watch. They still keep the display and enclosure and wristband from the original Casion F-91W watch, but the new board connects to a temperature sensor board, and more importantly, provides the ability to hack/program the watch with your own code, besides the few samples provided, or even design your own sensor board. Sensor Watch board specifications: MCU – Microchip SAM L22 Arm Cortex M0+ microcontroller @ 32 MHz with 32KB RAM, 256 KB of Flash with up to 16 KB EEPROM emulation area Display – Controller for 10-digit segment LCD, plus five indicator segments USB – 1x Micro USB PCB […]

Onera Health unveils Onera Biomedical-Lab-on-Chip with over a dozen sensor inputs

Onera Biomedical Lab-on-Chip

Onera Health, a Dutch-American MedTech company has just introduced the Onera Biomedical-Lab-on-Chip, an ultra-low-power biosignal sensor hub for wearable health, following their earlier work on sleep diagnostic solutions. The Arm Cortex-M4F based Onera ONE010 chip embeds a multi-channel sensor readout system with integrated data processing, power management, and interfacing features. It features biomedical inputs with 10 readouts for ExG, covering EEG, ECG, EMG, and EOG, 2 bioimpedance readouts, and 2 readouts for photoplethysmography, as well as digital filters and accelerators to process the data from the sensors. The microcontroller is also equipped with several standard wired interfaces such as UART, SPI, I2C, and I2S, operates from a single power source between 0.8V and 3.6V, and the company says a large amount of SRAM and embedded FLASH is available. I’ve managed to obtain a more readable block diagram and that means 320KB of SRAM and 768KB of flash. We can also […]

Pine64 launches PinePhone Keyboard case, back covers with LoRa radio, fingerprint scanner, wireless charging

PinePhone Keyboard Case

Pine64’s PinePhone Linux smartphone and its successor, the upcoming PinePhone Pro, are designed to be modular and extensible with a PinePhone Keyboard case prototype showcased here in April 2021 and aimed to transform the phone into what looks like a PDA. The design has now been refined, and Pine64 has just launched the PinePhone (Pro) keyboard case for $49.99, together with three back covers with either a LoRa module, a fingerprint scanner, or Qi wireless charging for $9.99 to $24.99 depending on the model. All are now available on Pine64 store. PinePhone (Pro) Keyboard Case Key features and specifications: ISO QWERTY layout with 54 keys in 5 rows. Note the key caps can be rearranged, so you could easily make an AZERTY or QWERTZ keyboard for example 180° hinge for two-hand typing on surface or thumb-typing when held Pogo pin connector to connect to PinePhone (Pro) smartphone USB – USB […]

NOVELDA UWB X4 sensor can detect submillimeter movements

NOVELDA UWB X4F103 sensor

We’ve just written about an ESP32 UWB board equipped with an ultra-wideband module designed for indoor positioning with about 10 centimeters accuracy, which should be good enough for many applications, but it turns out UWB sensors can be made to be much more accurate. NOVELDA has just announced the UWB X4/X4F103 sensor and development kit that can detect submillimeter micro-movements such as breathing for human presence detection and does so at a really low power consumption of under 2mW. NOVELDA UWB X4 (X4F103) highlights: High-precision ranging for accurate distance measurement and absolute range bounding based on patented impulse radar technology Low power consumption below 2mW, and no co-existence issues with other sensors Wide detection zone for accurate detection with up to 180-degree field of view Up to 5m range Works through plastic and glass or layers of clothing Package – 12 x 12mm sensor A big difference compares to Decawave […]

Unsurv offline – An ESP32 GNSS receiver board with NFC, accelerometer (Crowdfunding)

unsurv offline

Unsurv offline is a compact and lightweight board with ESP32 WiSoC, a GNSS receiver, an accelerometer, and NFC capabilities to help developers/users collect and analyze location data in a privacy-friendly way. Unsurv Technologies initially developed the board to better understand offline video surveillance with OpenStreetMap (OSM) data. It does so by using a database of camera locations from the OSM on the SD card, “counts” surveillance cameras as you walk past them, and you can then transmit data via NFC and visualize it on your smartphone. The accelerometer is used to wake up the board from deep sleep upon detection of motion. The company has now made the board open-source and other applications are also possible. Unsurv offline specifications: Wireless modules TTGO T-micro32 WiFi 4 and Bluetooth 4.2 module based on ESP32-PICO-D4 SiP with dual-core ESP32 processor, 4MB FLASH, ceramic antenna U-blox CAM-M8C (aka u-blox M8) module with concurrent reception […]

Chhavi – An ESP32-based fingerprint sensor with optional NFC, battery (Crowdfunding)

ESP32 Fingerprint sensor

Chhavi is a compact, wireless, touch-capacitive fingerprint sensor based on ESP32 WiFi and Bluetooth SoC that is offered with optional NFC connectivity and a battery. The Arduino programmable fingerprint sensor is equipped with Fingerprints‘ FPC BM-Lite fingerprint capacitive biometric sensor that’s much more compact and power-efficient than traditional optical fingerprint sensors. Chhavi specifications: SiP – ESP32-PICO-D4 system-in-package with ESP32 dual-core processor @ 240 MHz, 4 MB SPI flash Fingerprint sensor FPC BM-LITE Module with 99% accurate fingerprint sensing Sensor matrix: 160 x 160 pixels Number of pixels: 25,600 pixels Active sensing area: 8 x 8 mm Features – Automatic finger detection, one-to-one verification mode Durability – 10 million finger placements Connectivity 2.4 GHz 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi via ESP32 Bluetooth BLE 4.2/5.x via ESP32 Optional 13.56 MHz NFC via NXP PN7150 NFC I2C controller 3D antenna Display – FPC connector for display USB – 1x Micro USB port for power/charging, and […]

cuplTag battery-powered NFC tag logs temperature and humidity (Crowdfunding)

cuplTag NFC Tag sensor

Temperature and humidity sensors would normally connect to a gateway sending data to the cloud, the coin-cell battery-powered cuplTag NFC tag instead sends data to your smartphone after a tap. CulpTag is controlled by an MSP430 16-bit microcontroller from Texas Instruments which reads and stores sensor data regularly into an EEPROM, and the data can then be read over NFC with the tag returning an URL with the data from the sensor and battery, then display everything on the phone’s web browser (no app needed). cuplTag specifications: MCU – Texas Instruments MSP430FR2155 16-bit microcontroller @ 24 MHz Storage – 2K bytes EEPROM part of NT3H2111 for up to 188 temperature & humidity data points or 376 temperature-only data points Connectivity – Passive NFC, tap-to-read via NXP NT3H2111 NFC tag Sensors – HDC2021  temperature and humidity sensors Measurement interval – 3 minutes to 65535 minutes (Default: 10 minutes) Battery – CR1220 battery […]

Memfault IoT and embedded debugging platform