Category Archives: Sigfox

All my sigfox research, hack, experimentation and feedback

Smart Everything Sigfox board

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capture-decran-2016-10-14-a-21-14-03I have recently discovered the smartEverything prototyping board for Sigfox. This board was used during the SigFox maker tour and It is really nice for creating some prototypes and evaluate the technology.

The board is an Arduino board based on an Atmel SAM D21 MCU (Cortex M0) with 256KB of flash and 32K SRAM running @48Mhz

The most important part is concerning the sensors available on the card and this is clearly the best point about this board : you have a lot of them available : crypto authentication chip, BLE module, GPS, NFC, Accelerometer / gyroscope / magnetometer, Pressure / Humidity / Temperature sensor, proximity light / sensor, RGB Led, Led & push button. It can be powered by USB or external 2xAA batteries.

The board cost is about 106€ and can be found at RS. It is provided with a sigfox network access to the backend.

This post detail how to get start with the board

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Update Telecom Design SDK from 5 to 6.3.4

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TD1204 / Sigfox & GPS

TD1204 / Sigfox & GPS

New version of the Telecom design SDK has been released for TD1208 / TD1208R / TD1204 and now officially supporting TD1205.

This new version provide some bug fixes, like a crash after 21285 transmissions that could be after 212 days in case of full use… some I had in touch with could be interested… @pioupiou and also a bug that disable gpio interrupt after sigfox transmission (I experimented it !)

For the main evolution, this version is supporting FCC and TD1508 and improving sigfox transmissions.

From my experience, this version is also a good way to decrease the size of your binary files.

This post is about upgrading from a SDK 5 to SDK6 and the impact you can when recompiling your projects.

To install the SDK from scratch, just follow the well documented official post here.

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SigFox (LoRa) and antenna design

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antenaToday Sigfox is releasing a really good document about antenna design. This pretty document can be found following this link (available on July 7th). This document from TI also contains really well detailed information about the alchemy of antennas and the different kind of product you can find. From Silicon Labs you also have an interesting development kit for 868 antennas with performance published in this application note.

This is to say antenna is one of the most important part of a 868 object, as for Sigfox as for LoRa where the problem is basically the same. I discussed with different sigfox object designed and every-time the antenna was a big project issue. Some has payed about 10-15k€ to get a custom optimized design.

I never experiment a custom design but I made test with various antennas and the purpose of this post will be to give you my feedback on the different solutions.

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Make your IoT design on Sigfox or LoRa ?

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LoravsSigfoxOnce you have found the great idea of the year and you want to start implementing your first prototype it is time to choose the right technology. Some would say you should not choose at this step and implement both at end but in my point of view it looks like and economical mistake to do this way. Prototype is to demonstrate and final product. It can request another technology, for sure. But in my point of view the best is to take the right one at the beginning. For most LoRa and Sigfox are both equivalent or for some others one is over the other one, best depends who you ask. In my point of view, if I consider my 2-3 years sigfox experience and my starting experience on LoRa with 1 year background research on it, there is no magic answer. Context of your idea is the keypoint then you have some technical elements to take into account to finalize your decision.

This post will try to illustrate where each of the technology is the best and give you some decision keypoints.

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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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Telecom Design SDK decode GPS frame

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The Telecom Design SDK contains a function to encode GPS coordinates : TD_SENSOR_EncodePositionXY this function from the SDK allow to choose the size of the GPS encoded data and to reduce it. This post explains how this function works and gives a php implementation to decode it.

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Telecom Design TD1204 / TD1208 use DB2-DB3

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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

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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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