Author Archives: Paul

First step in LoRa land – microchip RN2483 test

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Microchip RN2483 Lora

Microchip RN2483 Lora

After spending some time reading and writing about LoRa it was a good time to make some real test of this technology.

As actually there is no network for LoRa, as much as I know, in my town, I expected to start a simple LoRa test (point to point and not as part of a WAN). I just bought some RN2483 LoRa module from Microchip online and also get some from Avnet (thank you Guillaume)

 

The module is easy to solder on a prototype board and get its command over a serial port. I choose to make two modules :

  • The first one is connected to a FTDI cable and will stay at home as a basestation
  • The second one is connected to an Arduino and will be a mobile device for my test

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What is LoRa ?

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Lora-300x171LoRa is a dedicated network for Internet Of Things and Machine2Machine communications. It is actually the main competitor against SigFox.

As LoRa is actually rising in France with different announce from 2 of the main cellular operators deploying the network, it is a good time to have a post on what it is, how it works and what differs compared with SigFox.

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Silabs EFM8 a low cost microcontroller based on 8051 core

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EFM8 chip

EFM8 chip

If you my blog and the lesson section you may notice my interest for 80×51 micro-controller family. Silicon Labs has recently launch a new 8b family based on this core.

With price less than 1 euros, they are interesting candidates for low cost hacking and hardware design. Even the programming cable is not really expensive ( $35 + port + Tax ) and the development environment is free.

EFM8 provides a 50MHz core with all the usual I/O – Serial, I2C, SPI. Plus 12 bit ADC, voltage regulator, oscillator…

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Telecom Design SDK decode GPS frame

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The Telecom Design SDK contains a function to encode GPS coordinates : TD_SENSOR_EncodePositionXY this function from the SDK allow to choose the size of the GPS encoded data and to reduce it. This post explains how this function works and gives a php implementation to decode it.

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WordPress revolution slider – start an animate on scroll

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wordpress-logoThe revolution slider is a way to animate a web page based on a wordpress plugin. When you create a slider it start to be animated directly when the page is loaded. So if your slider is on top of the page it is perfect but if your animation is on the middle / bottom, the animate will be finished when the user will scroll to that part.

It is possible to custom the javascript part and fix this problem as described in this post.

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Choose your smd (MLCC) capacitor

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mlcc-smd-kondensatoren-foto-samsungThere are different type of smd capacitor ; the one I mainly use are mlcc – multi layer ceramic capacitor. In this technology, there are different dielectric (NP0, X7R, X5R, Y5V) with different characteristics.

I was looking for informations about this and found different nice website. I’ll try to summarize what I found in this post.

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Some GNSS / GPS stuff that are good to know for IoT

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gpsWhen you start developing a GPS solution, you have to deal with energy and for this you have to create a strategy based on what you expect and the size of your battery.

Basically, a GPS is consuming about 25mA when running. An active antenna will consume about 10mA more. The first time you start it, it have to sync with the satellites, get the ephemeris then you can position in 2D then in 3D.

Read more for more information

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