Tag Archives: arduino

Montpellier Startup WeekEnd

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magicSquare startup weekend

magicSquare startup weekend

This weekend it was my first StartupWeekend I had kind of event past year having two bootcamps with my usual company for internal startup contest. By-the-way, the startup weekend is a little bit different.

That was a really nice experience I recommend. Basically, we came with some friend with a idea about providing a gaming environment for children where boy & girls can craft their own world and animate it thanks to the brick we are providing, using a programming language composed by domino they can manipulate. They won’t use any screen, only wood & plastic stuff that interacts with their crafted world.

After pitching this, we created a team by “hiring” people found in the crowd of participants. Some was from non selected ideas, some has came by curiosity and we got a nice mix of skills to start hacking the idea. Hacking the business model, hacking the technical solution…

After 2 days of intense work we had a final pitch where the top 3 of ideas has been selected by a jury and got some prizes. Even if our team has not been selected, we had a really great days seen all these nice ideas transformed in a weekend ; starting from quite nothing to become a credible business to develop.

We went to kickstart an idea, hack it, confirm hypothesis, meet people, meet future clients… and get fun ! for all of this it was a great success I’m happy to have done and to share this spirit ; here is a video we made during the event !

magicSquare par Disk91

Thank you all – eva, nico, bruno, gautier, pierrick, teo, alex, mathieu – and the staff & coach team for this weekend. Special thank to @olivez – we are looking at your photos 🙂

I now waiting for the next event like this !

IoT disruption, why it is the appropriate time ?

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In a previous post I explained why the IoT is appearing in this period thanks to the network technology evolution. It would not be a complete analysis if I would not care about the social evolution. In parallel of IoT and technologies there are other rising trends : Makers, Fablabs, embedded systems, 3d printing and crowd-founding.

Take a look at personal computing some decades ago when guys like Jobs or Gates make the first line of code and solder the first micro-processors in their garage ; they just used the technological elements available that time and were able to make them doing much more than what they have been made for. They did it because they were able to do it. The same story appends in the late 90’s with Internet : anyone was able to code some PHP stuff and create a service in his garage thanks to this students have created Facebook and many more.

At the opposite, when smart phone appeared in the middle of the 90’s it was a technology that requires strong industrial assets and this technology has been limited to major companies. The smart-phone revolution had been the same opening door to programmer to an new area with applications (apps). In fact all previous hardware evolutions since the Personal Computer beginning was requiring huge technological assets to be part of it.

IoT disruption is breaking these last 40 years where only software were hackable by getting hardware accessible.

Let see why

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Add wifi to an arduino for 4€ with an ESP8266

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esp8266 wifi for arduino

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

baby and child alarm clock

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Arduino alarm clock for baby

Arduino alarm clock for baby

The purpose of this post was to create an alarm clock form my 2 year old son. I’m lucky he is sleeping well but is waking up before I do and generally call me and mum to go out of the bed, then play in his room … So the problem is that he never know if can wake up and play or if it is too early and have to stay in the bed. For this reason I created this alarm clock to easily indicate him if it is sleep or play time.

The system is quite simple : you program the number of hour you want him to sleep. During sleep time a led display a pink color. After this configured duration, the color change for green. When green, my son is allowed to wake up and play in his room

The post describe how to do it based on an arduino nano.

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Download Arduino 1.5.8 Beta for Mac Os X

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arduino_logoAfter having update my Mac Os X, the java 6 have been removed and unfortunately Arduino request to use it. Personally I’m not really happy to install this not even more supported version of Java on my machine.

I was looking for the 1.5.8 Beta made for Java 7. I was not able to download it as the download stops in the middle even if I have a really good transfer rate at the beginning.

It seems that there is no mirror for Arduino (waouhou !! what that sh*t ?!?) and it seems this download problem is not really new. Here is the solution obtained from here. Use command line curl program:

curl -LOGC - http://arduino.cc/download.php?f=/arduino-1.5.8-macosx-java7.zip

The last step to be able to use it is to install Java from java.com

Draw breadboard circuits on Mac Os X

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Tp7_schema_bbTo prepare some lessons on Arduino I was looking for a solution to draw breadboard schemas. I found fritzing open-source tool really great.

The tools works on Max Os X but also many other platform. It includes many standard component libraries with arduino board and shields and standard components.

The time to be ready for using it is not really more than a minute. It exports your design is PNG, JPG, SVG. It also includes different display to create circuit schema and PCB printout. But I did not use them, preferring kicad for such things. By-the-way, this is a really great tool.

Start playing with LiPo batteries

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lipo battery

lipo battery

LiPo (Lithium Polymere) batteries are interesting batteries for IoT as they are nt so much expensive, easy to get with multiple form factors and multiple capacities. As they are used for radioguided planes and such toys, you have a lot of really small batteries available for a couple of euros.

The Lipo battery is typically providing 3.7V. This sounds good for 3.3V circuit. The charging circuit is quite easy and low expensive compare to some others battery technology.

But there is no miracle and a couple of problem I’m actually discovering and this post will introduce.

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SigFox arduino Raspberry PI hacking board

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sigfox hack board

sigfox hack board

I assume you know a little bit who I am and what I’m doing, I’m not the one to by > 100€ to buy a one shot development board kit to test & hack a device like the Telecom Design chip. So basically I built my own with the objective to work with multiple configuration.

My “cahier des charges” was to make a board able to be installed as a dauther board on a raspberry PI,  able to support an arduino, able to run autonomously and being able to own a TD1204 as a TD1208.

It was a huge work to route it and I must recognize that it do not have all the GPIO connected as I expected but it exists, it works and it help me to build my first SigFox prototypes with success.

So, now, I propose to distribute this board to those of you looking for a such swiss knife.

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