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.
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.
Telecom Design LAN capability is a 9600bps rf 868 transmission you can use with the sigfox modem to communicate between multiple TD120x devices. One of the main use is to have multiple sensors communicating to a sigfox gateway. The communication get benefit of the nice ultra narrow band RF transceiver included in the chip.
TD LAN is based on GFSK modulation on 25kHz channels working at 9600bps.
I did really remember where but I read it could reach long distance in the best conditions, so as it could open many opportunities, I wanted to test it in real conditions to see what we could get from it.
Raspberry PI Shiel Hat standard
The SigRPI shield is a HAT standard board providing SigFox connectivity to your Raspberry PI. As it is not certified for this network it can’t be used in production for this usage, but you can use it as a long range RF that does not need certification. I will later details this with a project related to this function.
By-the-way, the purpose of this board is to let you play easily with sigfox. The raspberry-pi offering a really efficient way to code and to make prototypes.
The shield comes with TD1204 (including accelerometer & GPS) of TD1208 (sigfox modem). You can use it with the standard firmware or upload your own one.
The shield can be ordered in the shop section : here
This posts details how to setup it and use it.
In the Telecom Design SDK, you have a cflash tool you can use to reflash your firmware from a serial port. This can be usefull to reflash a TD chip from another chip of from an embedded platform like a RaspberryPI.
This peace of code is not really nicely documented, so to avoid spending to many tries, here is the result of my investigations
Raspberry PI Shiel Hat standard
When you want to design a shield for Raspberry Pi, you have to follow the HAT standard. This standards describes the form factor of the shield to ensure future compatibility. It also describes the configuration solution for the board based on a flash containing necessary information. The Hat standard link gives all the detailed specification to design a such shield. In this post I’ll describe my experience of designing such shield and you will find the basic elements I build and now sharing with you.
The new version of kernel now activate the device-tree standard, it means that instead of having all module activated by default with some stopped by a blacklist system, now, all are disable and activated only when described in a device tree.
Device tree details the system architecture and dependencies following configuration files. The device tree can be owned by the shield itself in an attached eprom.
As a consequence, now, i2c / spi are not activated by default. So if you need to activate it on startup. For this, edit /boot/config.txt and add line at the end like :
dtparam=i2c_arm=on # for i2c 1 dtparam=i2c_vc=on # for i2c 0 dtparam=spi=on dtparam=i2s=on dtparam=i2c_arm=on,i2c_vc=on
Then reboot
esp8266 wifi for arduino
The ESP8266 is a simple standalone addon for any board that works fine with Arduino and only cost less than 4€ on ebay.
It can operate as a device or an AP can gives wireless network connectivity to your application. It is interfaced with Arduino based on a serial line. The only problem of a such thing ( as for most of wifi chip ) is the power consumption. It requires about 150mA to run ; a lot for batteries.
My Friend @couac made a really good post on how to make it working with a Yabas, basically any Arduino board, I recommand the reading of his post : william post on ESP8266