Category Archives: Technology

Tips and test on technological product and components. Operating system, networks, hardware, security…
Astuces et tests autour de produits et composants technologiques, systèmes, réseaux, hardware, sécurité …

Get computers for less than $15

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domino.io

domino.io

Announced in 2015 and mostly delivered in 2016, the 9$+ computers are now a reality. The first one  to be delivered was Domino.io with a price of 14$ it is actually the most expensive device but also one with a nice list of addon. The kickstarter campain was a success even if it raised only 46K$.

CHIP was in the same period of time a great success with 2M$ raised on Kickstarter for 50K requested. And actually it still incredible to me to reach a such cheap price for a device with a such complexity.

Last but not least, the famous RaspberryPI zero is just starting to be distributed at the incredible price of $5 and is actually impossible to obtained under $20 on ebay auctions.

As a owner of these 3 different platform, I will publish in this post the difference we have between them and what we can expect from them.

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Getting start with XYZ DaVinci 1.0 3D Printer

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DaVinci 1.0 3d printer

DaVinci 1.0 3d printer

After having play for a year with a Tobeca Printer, I decided to acquire a DaVinci printer. When I was looking for the Tobeca I was already interested in the DaVinci because of its really low cost. At this time, this printer was not available in Europe and the price for import was too expensive. The printer is actually distributed by Boulanger in France for a price about 500€ making it a really competitive solution with a good technical specification.

The XYZ business model is based on 2D printer business model : have a low cost printer and sell the cartridge at a higher price. For 800g of PLA you have to pay 50€ compared to 30€ for a Kg of standard PLA. By the way, it seems that you can get discount on Wednesday on XYZ website 😉

This post details my end user experience on getting the first print with this printer.

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NRF 51 BLE library for custom services

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nrf51 ble stack

nrf51 ble stack

After building my first project using an nRF51 device from the template given in the SDK I was really disappointed by the result, I mean, it works but the code is really bad and hard to maintain.

The given examples are not really generic and if you have to create your custom ble service and characteristics you have  to make many modification in a code that is not clean for all.

So my second project was to create a ble library to make creation of custom services & characteristics as easy as possible and to create a main file with less code.

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Play with remote selfie shutter and make your own Amazon dash button

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Bluetooth remote shutter

Bluetooth remote shutter

Remote Selfie shutter are really low cost Bluetooth 3 buttons that are really easy to hack for making different applications.

These button can be found on ebay, amazon or aliexpress like following this link for less that 6$. The button is paired to the smartphone and then allow to execute photo shoot without the need of any third party application.

 

 

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RF433 – Raspberry PI GPIO kernel driver for interrupt management

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You may have read some of my post about RF433 and Raspberry PI. Basically with RPI 1, I was using wiringPi interrupt handler to manage the RF433 decoding. The problem is that with RPI2 and RPI B+ the delay to take an interrupt that was becomes unpredictable. And the timing constraints are not respected. As a consequence part of the messages are loss because for these delay.

One of the solution (the software one) is to be more efficient to proceed the interrupts and the way to do this is to compile a kernel driver for directly handling the interrupts. This is what this post is about. This comes to complete the RFRPI code and associated hardware. A complete source code and software for using it is on the rfrpi bitbucket repository.

Challenge of the coming days : write a kernel driver to manage interruption quicker on a raspberry pi 2. I’m happy to find a lot of example on Internet and in particular this one, that is really looking like what I’m trying to do. This post is describing all the step needed to do this.

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Let’s graph the Internet of Things

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plot-IoTIoT is generating data and to quicky look at it during the prototype phase is sounds good to plot these data in a dashboard. There are many solution you can install on your server and configure to get pretty nice dashboard. But if you want to go faster it would be really nice to have a SaaS solution for doing this. I have tested some of the solution I have found and friends helped me to found (not easy to search on google …). This post details these experiments

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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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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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