Category Archives: Projects

Different projects conducted in my life, non professional projects, just some IT fun stuff made after work.

Understand IoT Security

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Who doesn’t associate the word IoT with security issues in 2022? Apart from those who do the IoT maybe? Like all emerging domains, shortcuts are easy, because they are poorly understood. I will try to give you some elements on what cannot be denied: security, in the IoT, as in other technologies, is an essential element. I will especially take care to explain to you why it is very essential in IoT, why this subject is poorly understood and also, why many times we talk too much on this subject.

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LoRaWAN soil moisture solar device using Helium network

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My child have a small garden where he has tomatoes, mint, different vegetables and fruits. We want to know when it is the right time to water it.

This was also an opportunity to use my Rak Wisblock kit fro something else than just writing some blog post. I’ve chosen to connect the device over Helium network because I’m making different tests on this network currently but it is also working on TheThingsNetwork the same way. So you can use the network most covering you around.

The data will be displayed on Cayenne Mydevice for getting a quick dashboard for displaying the information. In this blog post I’m going to describe the main steps and the needed hardware to make your own device.

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Use Wio Terminal as a serial logger

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When making IoT development, you need to debug on the Field. I’ve been using some serial logger to store information and analyze them after (I’ll post something about it once a day). But sometime you want to watch it in real time. So you need a small terminal you can easily transport with you. Smartphone could be cool and I’m sure we can hack something fun with a BLE connectivity. By the way, what I had in stock for doing a such thing was a Wio Terminal from Seeed.

This device is an Arduino compatible solution including a LCD screen 320×200, some interesting embedded sensors and a lot of IO to play with. The only bad point for me and the design I want to do is the absence of internal battery so you need to power it a different way.

What I need is just a Serial line to print on the LCD screen all what my IoT device want to share. Let see how I did make it.

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Bird watcher with balena Fin (or RaspberryPi)

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I wanted to play with my Balena Fin and make the famous Bird-Watcher but unfortunately, the documentation is a bit light to be able to reproduce it simply. So finally, I’ve decided to make a post about this project and the different steps to make it working.

The project is now deployed on a tree at home and waiting for some birds to be photographed.

Spoiler alert: I’ve not been able to capture any bird picture until now with it. The system is technically working but the default IA part seems to not be trained correctly to work in my garden. Birds came and eat, but did not leave me picture.

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LoRaWan solar gateway monitoring

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In a previous post, I’ve been introduce my home made LoRaWan solar powered outdoor gateway. I’ve been investigating on the minimal hardware to make it running and reach some interesting result in my garden ;). Now it’s time to deploy the gateway on the field (basically on a roof top) and this means I’ll not be able to continue to learn what how it evolves over time.

For this reason, I’ve made a small project to monitor the main elements I want to track about this gateway:

  • Battery Voltage
  • Battery in & out power
  • 5V powering availability
  • Temperature

For this I’ve selected a simple and LoRaWan all-included Arduino platform I already detailed in a previous post: the LoRa Radio Node. Let’s detail this project now available on github.

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Extend TD1204 Standard firmware to simplify GPS

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TD1204 / Sigfox & GPS

TD1204 / Sigfox & GPS

The TD1204 modem firmware is a easy to use solution for sending message to Sigfox network. It starts to be complex when you want to create your own message including the GPS position. The standard firmware returns the satellite NMEA frames in text mode and you have to process it.

To make it simple I built a modification of the standard modem firmware to add an extra command to enrich a message with a GPS coordinate automatically.

 

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TD1204 – TD1208 Raspberry PI Shield

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Raspberry PI Shiel Hat standard

Raspberry PI Shield Hat standard

The TD1204 / TD1208 Raspberry PI shield is following HAT standard. Is can be use with a RaspberryPI B+ or Raspberry PI 2. It includes 3 programmable leds plus the TelecomDesign Led. Some and the GPIO of the TD chip can be read/write from the RaspberryPi, Some can be cabled on the small customization area to add you own components.

The shield can be delivered with an external antenna of use with an SMT antenna.

Telecom Design chip can be flashed with an FTDI cable or directly with the RaspberryPi

This shield is not SigFox certified so it can only be used for prototyping usage.

All details about how to get started with this shield is in this post : Get start with the SigRPI Shield

Availability : 1 weeks

Contains : Shield with TD1208 + External Antenna

1 SigFox access is also provided for makers

Price : 140€

[wpecpp name=”td1208-rpihat” price=”140″ align=”center”]

For other version, read more

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New low consumption Atom devices

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Not really a news, but an interesting update on two new devices sold since march 4th, Atom family have, at least, two new Core, the first one is the N2650, the second one the N2850, they are two dual core, 4 thread CPU for netbook with a really low TDP.

The N2850 offers a 2GHz system with a 10W TDP, the N2650 offers a 1.7GHz system with a 3.6W TDP.

This has to be compared with my current reference (making no sens for you … but …) the D525 offering 1.8GHz for 13W. More over the IGP has been push from 400MHz to 640MHz on the N2850.

This configuration sound really interesting to build small and fanless machine… now we need to see the first box including these chips.

See Atom family on wikipedia : http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Atom