Why electronic does not mean china and why 5$ IoT is for Chinese ?

This is a regular discussion I have with prospect or with different business oriented people about producing electronics in developed countries and costs of devices. When you talk about electronic products in many minds it is equivalent to talk about Chinese production & design. It’s like when you talk about software in a couple of years ago it was a kind of synonym  with back-office Indian development.

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Sigfox on the move !

sigfox

sigfox

In many occasion some of my Sigfox prototypes has been in movement with difficulties to emit ; many source can cause this but basically from discussions with specialists speed is not a close friend of Sigfox technology.

As a quick test is always better than a long theorical discussion, tonight, I took my car and made some tests.

This post details the test of Sigfox running in a car at different speed.

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Sigfox technical basics

Sigfox has just published a documentation on the technical basis of the network. This pdf document is a good summary of all what you need to know to get start on the technology.

The document is attached here Sigfox technical overview

To complete this overview you can also take a look to my different post & video

Eclipse & nRF52 create a native project

As seen in a previous post, working with nRF52 and Eclipse is not the easiest challenge !

This post will detail how to create a template project for a BLE project using a softdevice working on the PCA10040 board and using my ble library.

This can be apply to most of ble starting project with nRF52. I assume you configured Eclipse IDE as described in this post. As a pre-requisite you also need git. The tutorial works with SDK 12.3

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Discover Nordic Semi nRF52832 with Eclipse

nRF52832_mediumnRF52382 is a BLE micro-controler based on a 32b Arm M4 core operating at 64MHz. It includes 512kb of flash memory and 64kb of RAM with a price about 2,80$.

It supports BLE (Bluetooth Smart) and ANT RF protocol. It also includes a NFC-A tag. NFC can wake up device and allow easy bluetooth pairing.

Device allows Over-the-Air Firmware Upgrade. It also have different SoftDevice (protocol stacks) with BLE or ANT8 or both.

By including internal Oscillators, power supply elements and Rf elements, this chip is a low cost solution for building IoT.

nRF52832 will be available Q1 2016 but development kit preview are available. (note – this post has been kept as a draft for a too long time !! )

Now, let’s read the next part for how to quick start with the development kit.

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Sigfox & LoRaWan network architecture and network kernels

New episode of my LPWAn post series, this time, about the network architecture and the role of the network kernel.

The network architecture is different than a classical IP communication from client to server: the LPWAn architecture is based on a kernel network allowing the protocol transformation from the Sigfox / LoRaWan world to the IP-Internet world.

In the LPWAn protocol the addressing is limited to one device address only to reduce the frame size and as a consequence all the frame have to be captured by a central system: the network kernel. It will route the message correctly to the end user application based on device association made on registration.

This post is related to a french video (as usual) and detailed in the following part of this post.

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Port a TD1208 firmware to TD1508

TD1208/TD1508

TD1508 is the FCC version of the TD1208, they are pin to pin compatible and based on the same SDK so converting an object working on a TD1208 sounds easy. Practically speaking there are some preparing steps because of some tiny bugs to solve.

Let see how to port a Telecom Design existing firmware for TD1208 to TD1508 (from ETSI to FCC).

 

 

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