Category Archives: Hardware

Tips and test on hardware components, including hardware programming and design.
Astuce et tests de composants matériels, micro-électronique et programmation FPGA.

BalenaFin – compute module motherboard

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The BalenaFin board, made by balena.io is a compact Raspberry Pi compute module 3 mother board.

This kind of setup is really useful when making industrial embedded systems in small to average volume like I did and described in a previous post presenting my solution on waveshare system.

I thank you Balena.io, especially Marc, for giving me the opportunity to test this product. So you understand I did not payed to get that one, but as usual, I’m totally free about what I’m writing about it.

The BalenaFin costs $129 w/o taxes and can be ordered on the balena shop. So, let’s how to use it and get benefit of the balena.io platform.

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Radio cable selection for outdoor (LoRaWan) antenna

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When looking for a cable to connect an antenna, you need to consider different parameters:

  • The cable loss at 868MHz (if corresponding)
  • The connector type

In this post I’ve tried to list some of the mostly used cable and connectors for connecting LoRaWan antennas.

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RAK WisBlock – a kind of industrial Arduino

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RAK is a company specialized in IoT hardware, particularly in the LoRaWan domain. They are well known for their LoRaWan concentrators working with raspberryPi.

Since a couple of month they have launched a new family of device, the Wisblock. This is a kind of Arduino solution with a MCU part (running a NRF chip with a LoRa transceiver) and different sensors you can connect to it to make an IoT device. That’s a really simplified way to see the solution as in fact the architecture is really different.

At first, the solution is based on a motherboard where you can plug different type of modules. You can have multiple additional sensors both side of the motherboard. We are also going to see that the way all of this is connected is industrial and can be use for prototypes, medium scale field deployment and finished product. That’s the main difference with a classical Arduino board.

The unit price of a solution with a GPS, MCU, Accelerometer is about $50, nothing really expensive for prototyping, a bit too high for a field experimentation, really high for an end product but apparently you can negotiate that price when you have a certain volume.

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IoT Antenna matching with Atyune

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Recurrent step when making an IoT device, the antenna matching is a key activity to get the right radio performance for your device. You radio strip and antenna must be tuned to match a 50 Ohm impedance. For doing this I’m using a miniVNA Tiny Vector Network Analyzer (until a switch to my Rigol Spectrum Analyzer) as described on the previously linked post.

The impact of a correct antenna matching has been addressed in an old post on this blog also.

Currently, to tune my antennas, I’m also using the Atyune tool. This tool is free and really good to make the tuning but also to get a better understanding of what you are doing. Let’s see how to proceed.

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Contact less connected thermometer

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I’ve recently made a post on how to make a pandemic alarming system based on low cost connected thermometers. This post was more about the organization model and business model than the technological solution and implementation. So I also wanted to continue to investigate the connected thermometer solution, mainly for the fun. As I’ve been sponsored by digitspace.com for some free hardware, it has been the opportunity for testing contact-less thermometers module.

The design I’m going to propose in this post will not apply to the low-cost connected thermometers as the technology I’m going to use is far more expensive to the one I proposed in my previous post.

That said, this design can be useful for companies, public site or free access thermometer booth anyone would like to design at low cost.

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Measure power consumption with Otii tool

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A usual question you have when designing a device is the autonomy of your battery and the power consumption of your device. By the past I’ve tried different tools for this usage. Starting with USB sticks power consumption, only working for high consuming devices. They are low precision. Going to multimeter tools with USB connectivity precise but sampling at 3-5Hz only. During a certain time I’ve plan to make a solution on my own and finally I’ve found the OTII tool from QOITECH on the recommendation of friends from Sigfox community.

Here is my experience with that tool.

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Battery selection for IoT design

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When making an IoT project the battery choice is something really important. Batteries stands for autonomy, sizing, price and usage conditions.

There is no universal solution to power your device, the right battery really depends on your requirements. To find the right powering solution you need to consider a certain number of parameters. We will try in this post to list most of them. This post is not exhaustive: I’m not a battery expert. This post is based on my own experience and you may consider it as a starting point, not a solution.

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Battery technologies usually used for IoT compared

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As it is a recurrent question to find the right battery for an IoT design, I decided to write a post about this topic. I’m not claiming to be an expert of this and I’ll not give insight on this. The purpose is to list the different technology existing with the main characteristics to be able to use the best fitting technologies quickly.

This post is presenting a table of the different battery’s technologies available with the main characteristics. These characteristics are global one regarding the technology. Each of the battery vendor can have specific specifications a bit different. You will need to take a look on datasheets details.

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