Telecom Design TD1204 / TD1208 use DB2-DB3

Telecom Design TD1204 have really limited number of GPIOs available even if it have many pins 🙁 … So you quickly have to use the DB2-DB3 pin that are usually used by SWD port.

If you try to reconfigure directly the Pin, this will not work until you inactivate SWD. For this, you must call first the following functions :

GPIO_DbgSWDIOEnable(false);
GPIO_DbgSWDClkEnable(false);

EFM32 – I2C for Telecom Design TD1204 / TD1208

A good way to expand Telecom Design system is to use I2C to connect external devices. As an example I had to add an extra Analog to Digital converter. I’m using a MCP3021Ax device. This I2C chip just return a 10bits value each time you send a READ at the expected address. This post contains the TD1204 code to configure I2C and get the data back

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SigFox – The Telecom Design Familly

TD1204 / Sigfox & GPS

TD1204 / Sigfox & GPS

Telecom Design provides 4 different chips to support SigFox communications. This post details the differences of each of them in term of functionnalities

All are modules are based on a EFM32 / Cortex M3 micro-controler with 128KB flash, 16KB RAM, ultra low power including a Silicon Labs transceiver. The chip is a EFM32G210F128

Read more for details

 

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My DiY lab – list of tools

This is not my lab !

This is not my lab !

I’m starting a project with a couple of friends and today they ask me : “if we want to duplicate your lab to parallelize the hardware stuff, what to we need?” That was an interesting question I want to share in this post. So I’m going to list all the stuff I’m using frequently with its price for my home hacking.

All that stuff is low end material but affordable !

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Installing arduino on ATtiny45 / ATtiny85

ATtiny45 and ATtiny85 are small Atmel micro-controleur like the 328p with less legs and smaller price. They can be nice platform for really small system does not requiring a lot of I/Os.

You can install Arduino on this device really easily. I won’t describe how to do because this excellent tutorial contains all what we need.

Montpellier Startup WeekEnd

magicSquare startup weekend

magicSquare startup weekend

This weekend it was my first StartupWeekend I had kind of event past year having two bootcamps with my usual company for internal startup contest. By-the-way, the startup weekend is a little bit different.

That was a really nice experience I recommend. Basically, we came with some friend with a idea about providing a gaming environment for children where boy & girls can craft their own world and animate it thanks to the brick we are providing, using a programming language composed by domino they can manipulate. They won’t use any screen, only wood & plastic stuff that interacts with their crafted world.

After pitching this, we created a team by “hiring” people found in the crowd of participants. Some was from non selected ideas, some has came by curiosity and we got a nice mix of skills to start hacking the idea. Hacking the business model, hacking the technical solution…

After 2 days of intense work we had a final pitch where the top 3 of ideas has been selected by a jury and got some prizes. Even if our team has not been selected, we had a really great days seen all these nice ideas transformed in a weekend ; starting from quite nothing to become a credible business to develop.

We went to kickstart an idea, hack it, confirm hypothesis, meet people, meet future clients… and get fun ! for all of this it was a great success I’m happy to have done and to share this spirit ; here is a video we made during the event !

magicSquare par Disk91

Thank you all – eva, nico, bruno, gautier, pierrick, teo, alex, mathieu – and the staff & coach team for this weekend. Special thank to @olivez – we are looking at your photos 🙂

I now waiting for the next event like this !

Have fun with solar panels for IoT

Ixys solar panel

Ixys solar panel

I’m looking at solar energy to power IoT device that will be used in a car. I did not found a lot of documentation on what we can do with solar panel and what kind of energy we can expect to get with a such system.

This post will summarize the information I got on solar panels and measures done.

 

 

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